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February, 2021
Thematic Area: 

Abortion is illegal in Jamaica. It is, however, easily obtainable, albeit with varying degrees of safety. In Jamaica, complications from abortion is the third leading cause of maternal death. Complications from unsafe abortions burden the public health system and exact economic, societal, familial, and individual costs. The familial and individual costs are disproportionately borne by poor, vulnerable women and their dependents. There are financial and opportunity costs of unsafe abortion morbidity and mortality as borne by the public health system when women seek treatment from complications arising from unsafe terminations (or attempted terminations.) Finally, there are legal costs: women who seek medical services to safely terminate a pregnancy, and medical practitioners who provide those services, risk arrest and prosecution. This report examines the negative societal and individual outcomes resulting from the unlawfulness of safe termination of pregnancy in Jamaica, and measures the economic impact of those negative outcomes.

November, 2020
Thematic Area: 

In 2019, for the first time the Government of Jamaica was (GOJ) assessed for how much it facilitates public access to budget information, and how many formal opportunities it provides for the public to participate in the national budget process. The Open Budget Survey (OBS,) the world’s only independent, comparative, and objective research instrument for this purpose, was used to do the assessment. The OBS also examined the role of Jamaica’s budget oversight institutions, such as the Parliament and Auditor General’s Department (AGD), in the budget process. Based on these indicators, the OBS provided an assessment of Jamaican citizens’ ability to engage the budget process and provide relevant feedback to the GOJ about budget decisions.

October, 2020
Thematic Area: 

This study explores the implications of a national identification system for Jamaica and provides evidence to support the need for a national identification card, including its economic value. Jamaica does not presently have an identification that serves as a general- purpose identification, usable across all activities. Such IDs, known as foundational IDs, are usually created with the general population in mind, rather than a specific group of citizens. It is the norm in many jurisdictions that such IDs are universally available and are used for multiple purposes. In Jamaica, instead of using a foundational ID, functional IDs, such as passport, electoral ID, and driver’s licence, together with the TRN, are used to authenticate citizens’ identity. Those means of identification were not intended to verify identities in other contexts, or by third parties, but rather to meet the objectives of the issuing organizations. These current ID systems are not only limited in their coverage and, for some, costly to obtain, but there is a lack of interconnectivity; that is, each system’s collection, processing, storage, and management of identity data is isolated from each of the others.

August, 2020
Thematic Area: 

This study examines the barriers to entrepreneurship that Jamaican women face, and to offer relevant policy solutions to remove those barriers. Of the research that does exist, case studies and qualitative evidence suggests that there are constraints facing female entrepreneurs that men do not encounter. However, there is a general lack of empirical evidence on what these barriers are, and how they operate, particularly in emerging countries such as Jamaica. Jamaican women entrepreneurs have been featured in traditional and online media articles which tell their stories, and usually include some of the difficulties they have encountered, which may or may not be related to gender, but there is a dearth of evidence-informed analysis. This is a well-recognized problem: one recommendation posited in the newly updated Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSME) & Entrepreneurship Policy, which is administered by the Ministry of Industry, Commerce, Agriculture and Fisheries (MICAF,) was the need for more empirical research to outline the realities facing Jamaican women, and to support the efforts of the government in combating identified barriers.

 

March, 2020
Thematic Area: 

Any country which wants to maximize the productivity of its workforce, and to harness the full potential of its people towards economic growth and development, must proactively reduce or eliminate discrimination against groups of people who are excluded from full participation as a result of that discrimination.

In Jamaica, where discrimination against LGBT people is rife and amply documented, such discrimination results in a senseless waste of human potential, with negative implications for the country’s economic growth prospects. This report examines the landscape of sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in Jamaica, and how that discrimination can be directly and indirectly tied to negative economic and social outcomes and thwarted developmental prospects.

February, 2020
Thematic Area: 

Gangs, organized crime, and violence, and the nexus between them, are Jamaica’s biggest citizen security challenge. With the second highest murder rate in the Latin America and Caribbean region in 2019, Jamaica’s extreme violence is often attributed to gangs. Between 2008 and 2018, gang-related violence was responsible for 56 percent of murders in Jamaica, with a high of 78 percent in 2013. Jamaica is a violent country in other ways, with extraordinarily high rates of domestic violence, including intimate partner (IPV) and gender-based violence (GBV). Jamaica’s violence problem is so pernicious that the country has come to be described by academics and policy makers as having a “culture of violence.”

September, 2019
Thematic Area: 

Jamaica's extraordinarily high levels of violence undermine citizen security and retard economic growth. Over the past two decades, dozens of state and non-state actors, in a desire for peace, have initiated several violence-reduction/ intervention programmes in August Town. So when, in 2016, the violence plagued community recorded “zero murders,” all of Jamaica took note. The cries about how this was achieved, which, with the exception of 2016 remain unchanged. After decades of extraordinarily high violence, with a homicide rate of 120 per 100,000, how did August Town achieve this?

With reference to August Town’s “zero murders” in 2016, this study explores the various theories with the objective to distil “lessons” from August Town’s experience, particularly as it regards anti-violence interventions, with the aim to build knowledge on the different approaches to reducing violence in high violence settings; and ultimately to inform GoJ decisions regarding the direction of and investment in violence prevention intervention programmes in violence-ridden communities.

September, 2019
Thematic Area: 

Murder and extreme violence are at crisis levels in Montego Bay. The city is also the birthplace and centre of the lottery scamming industry and its offshoots, an industry that generates millions of U.S. dollars a year, and is thought to be connected to the high murder and shooting rates in St. James. This study considers the purported nexus between lottery scamming, gangs, and the high murder rate in St. James by situating St. James’ violence problem in its socio-economic context, and reviews the measures that have been taken over the past decade to tackle both problems.

November, 2018
Thematic Area: 

Despite many public statements at the highest level assuring commitment to environmental protection and sustainability, the Jamaican government has failed to operationalize these promises. Deforestation, soil erosion, degradation of coastal ecosystems, over-fishing, poor air quality, poorly managed parks and protected areas, pollution of harbours, rivers, streams and aquifers, unplanned and unregulated settlements in areas most vulnerable to natural disasters, inadequate management of solid and liquid waste, and poor development planning and control are key features of the state of Jamaica’s natural environment. It has long been recognized that the weakness of the environmental regulatory and institutional framework is the primary obstacle to good environmental stewardship.

 

November, 2018
Thematic Area: 

A country’s ability to mobilize revenue through taxation (i.e. to have an effective tax system) is synonymous with its capacity to achieve sustainable growth and development. Through taxes, the state receives the funding necessary to perform its functions and duties effectively. As such, the first and often the main objective of a tax system is to generate sufficient revenue to finance public sector activities in a non-inflationary way. This report focuses on the relative effectiveness of different tax types–value added taxes, income taxes, and property taxes – to generate revenue in the Jamaican context. It assesses and compares the efficiency of each tax type. 

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