By Lavern Clarke, Staff ReporterJAMAICA'S PUBLIC debt has ratcheted up to $572.7 billion as at the end of December, 2002, surpassing the Ministry of Finance's own projections of the country's total indebtedness to the end of the current fiscal year.
Finance Minister, Dr. Omar Davies, had told his parliamentary colleagues that the public debt stock, which stood at $538.5 billion last September, would have ended up at $569.4 billion in March 2003.
But this week, figures released by the Ministry show that the debt has already overshot that figure by $3 billion, with three months yet to be reported on.
The Ministry's promised comments on the figures were not forthcoming up to press time.
Under the targets announced in mid-December during the approval process of this year's supplementary budget, Dr. Davies' figures had indicated that the debt would have grown an average $5 billion per month for the second half of the fiscal year. However, for the period October to December alone, the actual movement was more than $10 billion per month.
The Government's deepening indebtedness appears to be a function of how it has managed its fiscal accounts. Disappointing revenues, coupled with unbudgeted expenses for floods, more than $8 billion of underbudgeted expenses for salaries and $3.8 billion in interest payments on existing debt, have forced the Ministry of Finance into the open market to borrow more in order to meet its financial obligations.
The Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ), which tracks the economy, reports the fiscal deficit at $21.8 billion as at September. The Opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) estimates that the gap in the budget is now $26 billion.
The Ministry of Finance reports that central Government operations were $11.3 billion in the red as at December, a figure net of $81.4 billion of loan receipts and $58.5 billion in amortisations or debt payments. The loan receipts also helped to close the $34 billion gap between revenues of $79.1 billion and expenditures that mounted to $113.4 billion in the nine-month period since April.
The new figures on the outstanding debt would have pushed the debt/GDP ratio closer to 145 per cent, based on the $394 billion projection for Gross Domestic Product a ratio that will hold only if the debt were to remain static for the January to March period.
However, the Ministry of Finance has been to the domestic capital market at least three times since January, and is currently attempting to raise at least another US$220 million on the international markets to close the financing gap in the budget.
