By Tameka Gordon   Despite an anticipated eight per cent decline in the local economy for the first three months of 2021, the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) has said that its projections are in line with a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecast of 1.5 per cent growth this year. The nation’s planning agency…

By Jonielle Daley Bosses seeking to stipulate employee vaccination against COVID-19 as a condition of work have been warned that they would be hard-pressed to impose that standard on the grounds of public safety. Emile Leiba, president of the Jamaican Bar Association, said if any company sought to make immunisation a pre-employment condition, it would…

The Government has crafted a lean Budget for the upcoming fiscal year, focusing on an ambitious vaccination programme and jobs as linchpins to spark economic recovery. Both the recurrent and capital budgets are flat year on year, but the Government plans to introduce a $60-billion programme it dubs ‘Serve Jamaica’, aimed at facilitating the vaccination…

The country’s unemployment rate increased by 3.5 percentage points between October 2019 and October 2020 to leave 10.7 per cent of Jamaica’s labour force unemployed. The number were released yesterday by the Statistical Institute of Jamaica (STATIN) which further noted that the labour force declined by 51,500 or 3.8 per cent over the year. During…