The second coming of the IMF

Martin Henry, Contributor

As everybody knows, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is now here at the country's request to negotiate a new loan agreement after the P.J. Patterson administration told the Fund ta-ta in 1995.

The last administration had renewed a borrowing relationship between the desperate country and the IMF as the cheapest source of funds and the Grand Endorser of economic reform which will make other lenders want to turn out their pockets.

Negotiations have been in the doldrums for more than a year, despite campaign promises by the PNP for an early and quick agreement following the December 2011 general election. For many, indoctrinated by warped media and political communication, the IMF is another name for the Devil.

The Fund first arrived in 1977 and maintained a lending relationship with the country for several years before adopting a non-lending monitoring role. Michael Manley opened his famous 'We are not ashamed' Budget Debate speech of 1978 with these words: "Everybody knows that we have dealt with the International Monetary Fund because the country has no foreign exchange and needed to work out the kind of agreement that would make foreign exchange possible." His Budget Debate speeches, 1969-1991, have been collected by Delano Franklyn in Michael Manley: The Politics of Equality.

Manley went on to say in that famous 1978 speech: "I think everybody must know by now that there are many things, tough things, that would have had to be done, in any case, and there are some things in the present economic package that are tougher than we would wish and will exert more pressure on the people than we would wish."

The country is now in 2012 watching helplessly as its net international reserves, its savings of foreign exchange, basically US dollars held by the Bank of Jamaica, dwindle away from their highest levels ever in 2010-2011. Finance Minister Dr Peter Phillips is in full accord with his predecessor, now in Opposition, Audley Shaw, that a new IMF deal is absolutely necessary if the leaking country is to keep afloat. The private sector joins Government and Opposition in one
accord.

President of the PSOJ, Christopher Zacca,
appeared in the press last week solemnly announcing that the alternative
to the IMF pain is even more pain. In truth, there is "no IMF pain".
The country's pain, with or without the IMF, is by and large the product
of its politics and governance over many destructive
years.

Zacca says that, in the short run, the most
pressing economic issue facing the country is the pending (dis)agreement
with the IMF. Be that as it may, surely, in the longer-run past and
future, the most pressing economic and political issue facing the
country is why we need the IMF at all. The IMF only enters by
invitation. Chris Zacca himself points out that over the 50 years of
Independence, figures from the World Bank indicate that our per capita
GDP has grown at an annual average of 0.6 per cent. This is only
one-third of the average global per capita growth rate of 1.8 per cent
since 1962.

INCOME GROWTH

If Jamaica
had grown at the world average rate for per capita GDP over the last 50
years, GDP would have been three times higher than it is today, Zacca
points out. What the rest of the world has achieved in income growth per
person in the last 50 years will take us another 100 years to achieve,
plodding along at our 1962-2012 average rate of growth in per capita
GDP, he warns.

Long before the demonisation of the IMF
became entrenched in the popular mind through manipulative
communication, Michael Manley thundered in Parliament in 1978: "Let me
be clear, and do not let anybody come and tell me you cannot deal with
the IMF if you are critical. Anybody who believes that is living in some
dream world that they invented for themselves."

The
country having failed an IMF test in the very first year of borrowing,
the prime minister advised, "Internally, we must work to meet the [next]
test, be careful with the foreign exchange, careful and strict of the
expenditures, monitor what is to happen, and it will happen. It can
happen and we are going to make it happen." This is four years after the
snap announcement of universal 'free education' which subsequent
history proved to be unsustainable.

The looseness of
language in the tail of Mr Manley's statement on fiscal responsibility
under IMF manners is indicative of the looseness of governance through
much of our period of Independence. The punchline of the speech was, "We
are not ashamed."

And here is Mr Manley on the
matter: "There are some that were trying to make this political movement
ashamed, because there is an economic crisis, and I am going to tell
you very frankly, you know, when I listen to that noisy minority, I
really do not feel ashamed." (emphasis mine) He then rolled out in
inimitable Manley style a long list of achievements of which he would
not be ashamed.

LET US BE
CLEAR

Jamaica has mostly been governed on the premise
that good political intentions can trump the laws of economics, that you
can distribute that which was never gathered, grow what is not watered
and, like God, speak development into existence.

Let
us be quite clear about it: The International Monetary Fund is part of a
global economic and financial system (including our local commercial
banks) which is inherently unjust. The colonial powers had an unfair
historical advantage in industrialisation, modernisation and
development, which resources sucked out of the colonies helped to drive.
The prices of raw commodities, the mainstay of most developing,
postcolonial countries, have regularly tumbled on world
markets.

It must have been a feisty and perceptive
Jamaican donkey weh sey, "Di worl' nuh lebel." It isn't. But, in an
unlevel world, developing countries have pursued their development at
uneven pace, with Jamaica having some particularly bad stats on some
critical indices like the ones Chris Zacca of the PSOJ spoke of last
week. And the domestic politics of countries is more to blame than
external economic forces.

The IMF is, fundamentally, a
bank, a development bank. Jamaica, too, has an internal development
bank. Banks lend clients money under terms and conditions designed to
ensure loan repayment, and, the higher the risks, the tougher the
conditions.

Michael Manley said in that 'We are not
ashamed' 1978 Budget Debate speech that Jamaica, with several other
developing countries, was pushing for a reform of the IMF as the world's
development creditor owned by all the member states, however unequally.
"The time has come when the Third World must have a voice of
decision-making in the IMF," he forcefully argued.

Mr
Manley was in the forefront of the struggle for a New International
Economic Order, the famous NIEO, which he later said US President Ronald
Reagan "killed with a smile" in a CANCUN meeting with Third-World
leaders. Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, a successor of Michael
Manley, has just been, like him, elected a vice-president of Socialist
International (SI).

The SI congress in South Africa
heard from a keynote speaker that "a truly democratic economic system
with opportunities and financial justice for all can be achieved if we
are able to learn from the previous mistakes made". The pursuit of this
dream is likely to be as costly to the advocates as the pursuit of the
NIEO was a generation ago.

Mr Seaga, as prime minister
and minister of finance in the 1980s, had his own quarrels with the
inherited IMF, a quarrel which he details in Volume II, Hard
Road to Travel, of his
autobiography.

POLITICAL COST

At the
heart of the disagreement were the political cost of the structural
adjustment programme and the possibility of ensuing social unrest.
"Several discussions with Fund officials," Mr Seaga writes, "failed to
ease the pressure of performing under such rigorous conditions. It was
not that we were not going to endeavour to reach the targets, but the
political fallout would have been so great that the Government would
have been unable to carry the people with the
programme."

The problem is, a stagnant or declining
economy imposes the same, or even higher, costs, although more slowly
and less directly. Case in point: Mr Seaga quarrelled with the IMF over
the Fund's insistence on a 2.5 per cent depreciation of the Jamaican
dollar, then at $5.50 to US$1. The dollar has subsequently broken loose
and galloped away, approaching 90:1, without any help whatever from the
IMF.

Perhaps the two biggest political sins committed
in Independence, one economic, one social, is the wanton debasement of
the Jamaican currency, which is at the very heart of the Jamaican
economy as the storehouse of value of personal and public property; and
the sharp decline in public order and public safety, with the murder
rate being the most stark manifestation.

The IMF is
back by invitation, perhaps more flexible, more willing to listen, to
support the country's doing what has to be done anyway, if we are to
escape our malingering past. It is the country's structural adjustment
programme with Government, Opposition and private-sector consensus, not
the IMF's.

The critical elements remain precisely what
they were when the Manley Government of the 1970s went to the IMF 35
years ago in 1977: Close the Budget deficit, even if this means reducing
expenditure on social services; reduce the cost of the public service,
including pension costs; increase tax revenue and reduce dependence on
borrowings, while paying down the existing
debt.

Suppose we had done all this beginning 35 years
ago?

Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and
medhen@gmail.com.