PIOJ boss sees difficulty in further decrease of poverty

from the Jamaica Observer

DR Wesley Hughes, the director general of the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ), says Jamaica will have a difficult time decreasing national poverty much below the 14 per cent mark unless the country can creatively target the illiterate and unskilled.

"We've been able to move the poverty ratio from 30 down to 14 [but] it becomes more difficult now to move it further down...We have a hard core now who are illiterate and who have very low skills and it is very difficult to move that core out of poverty," he said.

Dr Hughes, who was speaking at the launch of the Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions 2006, said that special projects and programmes aimed directly at the disadvantaged group were necessary because many of them have not been able to access other interventions such as training under the HEART programme or food and health care under the PATH programme.

His comments were based on the 2006 poverty indicator for Jamaica which stood at 14.3 per cent, down from 14.8 per cent in 2005. The figure was consistent with the steady decline experienced in the country since 2002 when the incidence of poverty was recorded at 19.7 per cent.

Poverty in the Kingston Metropolitan Area and in rural areas went down by 0.2 per cent and 1.3 per cent, respectively, according to the report.

PIOJ director, Dr Pauline Knight, said that despite the marginal decrease in national poverty between 2005 and 2006, there was a general increase in the living conditions of Jamaicans. She, however, made a distinction between household poverty and public poverty, the latter of which she said could give the impression that poverty was more pervasive than it really is.

"I conclude from looking at the data over the years that we are seeing an improvement in the resources available to households in terms of the money they have in their pockets to meet their needs. However, the other side of poverty is the living conditions in the community [such as conditions of] roads and housing. That is not improving in the way that the disposable income is improving and so we need to address that," she told the Observer.

Said Knight: "If you look around and see the environment degraded, it looks as if everybody is in poverty when they are really not. They can spend money to meet their basic needs, they just live in deplorable conditions and I think that that characterises a lot of what's happening in Jamaica today."