Kingston vendor Annie Ivey is just two years short of being 80 and has been working her entire life in different low-paying jobs but has never had a pension plan. She has no clue when she will retire. “Anytime mi cyah go nuh more. Mi nuh sick yah now, so me can work,” said Ivey, who has been vending in the Cross Roads Market for more than two decades. Ivey is among thousands of older Jamaican women who are facing the risk...
A sum of $81 million has been allocated in the 2021/22 Estimates of Expenditure, currently before the House of Representatives, towards the continuation of the Integrated Support to the Jamaica Social Protection Strategy project. The initiative is being implemented by the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, through funding from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). It aims to support, protect and promote the human capital accumulation of the Programme of Advancement through Health and Education (PATH) beneficiaries. It also seeks to strengthen...
Alternative investments have been creating quite a buzz in the financial market as investors contend with the effects of a global pandemic, geopolitical risks, and the resulting impact on the performance of traditional assets such as stocks and bonds. This roller coaster experience in traditional asset prices caused by the aforementioned factors is expected to become the new normal but has negative implications for long-term financial goals. As a result, the search for investments in assets in non-traditional spaces, which...
Chief actuary at Actman International Limited, St Elmo Whyte, says the Government should make pension contributions compulsory for Jamaicans as security in their retirement. Contributions to the national pension scheme is compulsory for employed persons, but compliance is below par, while private employers are not required to set up schemes for their workers. The actuary said at the Sterling Asset Management virtual investor forum, in which he was a panellist this week, that there must be a way to...
The Pension Industry Association of Jamaica, PIAJ, says the COVID-19 economic task force’s recommendations about disaggregating the limits placed on debt and equity investments, as well as an increase in the limit for private equity investments for pension funds, are encouraging. “All our lobby efforts in relation to the liberalisation of investment limits were premised on private equity having its own limit and not aggregated with private debt, as is currently the case,” said PIAJ President Sanya Goffe. Those...
The Government’s COVID-19 Economic Recovery Task Force very much duplicates the existing National Partnership Council that had been established to drive Jamaica’s economic development long before the advent of the global pandemic. The recovery process will be long and arduous, but the first order of business for Jamaica is to keep the wheels of industry turning, which is the initial focus, I believe, of the task force. Beyond that, the groundwork for a full and sustained recovery has to...
The Government's COVID-19 Economic Recovery Task Force very much duplicates the existing National Partnership Council that had been established to drive Jamaica's economic development long before the advent of the global pandemic. The recovery process will be long and arduous, but the first order of business for Jamaica is to keep the wheels of industry turning, which is the initial focus, I believe, of the task force. Beyond that, the groundwork for a full and sustained recovery has to...
Dr Dennis Edwards, who was part of a panel organised by the Caribbean Sociological Association (CASA) to examine the social fallouts occasioned by the pandemic last week, said COVID-19 should be taken “as a sort of opportunity in disguise”. “I am of the view that we here in the Caribbean – this being maybe the third most multi-hazard region in the world – should be taking this time to simulate, model, drill, not only for a single disaster such...
The privatisation of the pension fund system in Latin America was hailed as one of the most important developments of the 1990s. A major challenge for developing countries is the lack of local savings. By definition, developing countries are in transition. They need a great deal of capital to modernise their infrastructure and improve their workforce through better education and health systems. This left most countries highly dependent on international capital flows. The problem is that international capital flows...
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) says it has partnered with Japan's Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) in promoting and developing “socially responsible capital markets” through investments in IDB social bonds focused on education-youth-employment (EYE) in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Washington-based financial institution on Wednesday said that its social (EYE) bonds “foster human capital development from the classroom to the workplace”. “The funds raised through them will finance projects in Latin America and the Caribbean that promote effective...
