Conditionalities and Cross-conditionalities in the 1980s: The Jamaican Experience

Abstract

Since the 1970s Jamaica has become an important case study in the role international financial institutions play in small developing Third-World countries. Several reasons explain this interest. First, because of the large number of agreements which the country has had with the IMF. Between 1977 and 1987 the country signed seven agreements with the IMF, a distinction which few countries anywhere in the world can or would want to claim. Second, these programmes have been carried out under two governments with distinctly opposing ideological viewpoints, resulting in analyses that have become standard fare for social scientists and political analysts who are concerned about the viability of democratic socialism in small peripheral states, versus those who recommend supply-side, free enterprise, private-sector-led growth within the context of closer ties with the international economy. Third, Jamaica represents one of the first countries in Latin America which signed structural adjustment loans (SALs) with the World Bank. The large number of policy-based loans (three SALs and two sectoral adjustment loans (SECALs)) which it has received between 1982 and 1988, as well as a host of other project and programme lending, both bilateral and multilateral, designed to support these programmes, make the country an interesting case study on the role, importance and success of stabilisation/adjustment policies in the 1980s.