The information on public indebtedness in Caricom revealed in the table which I presented last week, indicates that several Caricom countries have higher public debt-to-GDP ratios, than several of the beleaguered economies in the Eurozone area (particularly Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain, the so called PIIGS grouping). The six Caricom countries that form the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) are all among the fifteen most highly indebted developing countries and emerging markets in the world!
As the data in that table further reveal, three of the ECCU countries had public debt-to-GDP ratios, which at the end of 2011 exceeded 75 per cent, namely, St Kitts and Nevis (153 per cent), Grenada (87 per cent), and Antigua and Barbuda (76 per cent). It is worth pointing out here, the targeted level of public indebtedness established by the ECCU for its member states is 60 per cent.
For Caricom states as a whole, two others apart from St Kitts and Nevis had public debt-to-GDP ratios at the end of 2011 in excess of 100 per cent, namely, Jamaica (139 per cent) and Barbados (117 per cent). The IMF 2011 global database also reveals that four Caricom countries were among the dozen most highly indebted for the 171 countries listed in its rankings. Furthermore, eight of the 40 most highly indebted countries worldwide were Caricom states.
Updated information on Jamaica (Q3, 2012) reveals that it had an outstanding debt of US$18 billion, and that its interest payments on this huge public debt account for one-tenth of its GDP. This makes it, on a relative basis, perhaps the country with the highest burden of public debt payments in the world!
Caricom studies on debt
There is a formidable list of studies which have discussed sovereign debt and related