Following the May meetings that concluded Monday of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) Bank of Jamaica held its overnight policy rate at 7 percent, although sighting lower inflation than projected, the rate has been at this level since November 2022, but the bank maybe signalling rate reduction in late summer.
According to the Central Bank Jamaica, the “headline inflation rate at April 2024 was 5.3 percent, which was within the Bank’s target of 4 to 6 percent and 0.3 percentage point lower than the rate recorded at March 2024. It was also lower than the Bank’s most recent forecast, mainly due to a faster-than-projected deceleration in agricultural food inflation. Core inflation (which excludes food and fuel prices from the Consumer Price Index (CPI)) was 5.7 percent in April 2024, marginally lower than the 5.9 percent in March 2024.”
BOJ cautioned that ‘while some key drivers of headline inflation, such as international grain prices and inflation expectations, continued to decline, international oil prices have increased. Inflation in the economies of Jamaica’s main trading partners has continued to moderate albeit at a slower-than-projected pace. The exchange rate has remained generally stable, given Bank of Jamaica’s (BOJ) monetary policy actions as well as strong tourism and remittance inflows.”
Jamaica’s Central Bank
BOJ went to further state, “the moderation in inflation is expected to be interrupted temporarily as inflation is projected to breach the upper end of the target range towards the end of the June 2024 quarter, mainly reflecting seasonally higher agricultural food inflation, a normalisation in electricity rates following significant declines in the same quarter of 2023, as well as higher transport costs due to an uptick in international oil prices. Inflation thereafter is projected to return to the target range and generally remain there over the next eight quarters except for a few months in 2025. The projected breaches in 2025 largely reflect a normalisation of agricultural prices following sharp declines in March 2024, which are not projected to re-occur.”
At the end of the auction total CDs that will be outstanding for 30 days amount to $128.5 billion this is down from under $160 billion dollars in late March when the average rate was 11.13 percent.
The 2024 calendar year inflation is now negative 1.9 percent and seems set to push inflation to zero by the end of summer after the months when inflation tends to rise above norms.
The data was taken from a report on airport traffic during April published by Grupo Aeroportuario Del Pacifico operators of Jamaica’s two major airports.
Jamaica’s 
The moderately improved inflows pushed the year to date performance above 2023 with a marginal increase to $499.6 million from $499 million.
The decline represents the eighth consecutive month of negative inflows since June last year for the country.
With most businesses having granted healthy wage increases in 2022 and 2023, this publication does not expect there to be much wage pressure on inflation this year. With the inflation rate for the first three months of the year now at negative1.3 percent, which could climb even more in April, the increases in the summer months that usually flow from farm produces is likely to wipe out the gains in the early months but that should set the stage for the point to point to continue to trend to the lower end of BOJ’s mandate of 4 to 6 percent.
The bank went on to state “the analysis of the inflation numbers shows that the downward movement in the Consumer Price Index, for March 2024 was largely influenced by a 1.8 per cent decline in the index for the heaviest weighted division, Food and Non-Alcoholic Beverages. While the Bank had anticipated a decline for this division, the contraction was larger than expected and reflected reductions in the prices of some agricultural produce, such as tomato, yam, sweet potato, cabbage and carrot.”
The data while not the exact outcome of stopover tourist arrivals to the country, provides a good indication of tourist traffic flows into the country.