Sustainable growth remains a 'critical challenge' for Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller (left) and her Minister of Finance Dr. Omar Davies (right), according to the Inter-American Development Bank. - File

Dr. Omar Davies, minister of finance, left for Asia Tuesday with two members of his economic team for two rounds of meetings.

The minister, accompanied by his financial secretary, Colin Bullock, and director general of the Planning Institute of Jamaica, Dr. Wesley Hughes, is at a three-day Commonwealth meeting of finance ministers in Sri Lanka, where he will be one of the presenters.

The meeting began Tuesday with a call for rich nations to keep their promises over debt relief and aid to the poor, according to wire reports.

Don McKinnon, secretary-general of the 53-nation group of some two billion people, said the Group of Eight leading industrialised nations had not yet delivered on a pledge, made at Gleaneagles in Scotland last year, to double aid to the world's poorest countries and speed up debt write-offs.

Heavy criticism

In Sri Lanka, Davies will speak to his Commonwealth colleagues on the topic 'An Agenda for Growth and Livelihoods'.

He has been heavily criticised at home for consistently missing his growth targets, which have averaged less than two per cent within this decade, and about one per cent in the 1990s.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), in its Jamaica Country Strategy 2006 report, names the achievement of sustainable growth as a "central development challenge" for the administration, but says it is "critical for raising living standards."

Even if Jamaica were to achieve its medium term target of an average 3.5 per cent growth per annum, the IDB report says, it would only mean an average 3.09 per cent increase in per capita income, a level insufficient to compare to incomes in developed countries.

At those growth levels, the development bank said, looking 20 years ahead (from 2004 to 2024), per capita income would still be about 12.4 per cent of incomes in OECD countries.

Its analysis is based on year 2004 income of U$2,975, which it projects will reach US$5,465.

Its base case scenario for the same period, estimated it said on an 1.22 average growth in income 24 years prior to 2004, projects that per capita income would only be US$3,792 or 8.6 per cent of OECD countries.

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