This Poverty and Social Impact Analysis(PSIA) explores the distributional effects of a package offiscal reforms initiated by the Government of Jamaica andsupported by the World Bank under the programmatic fiscalsustainability Development Policy Loan (DPL) series. The DPLseries supports improved budget and debt management in orderto reduce the debt overhang and create additional fiscalspace for productive public spending, including socialexpenditures. The PSIA discusses the poverty anddistributional impacts of the prior actions supported underthe DPL, with a particular focus on two reform actionslikely to have the most significant impacts: (1) tax reformand (2) public sector reform, focusing on rationalization ofpublic bodies. The report offers both quantitative andqualitative assessments of the potential poverty anddistributional effects of these policy changes. The reportis structured as follows: section two analyzes the expectedimpact of changes in tax policy; section three investigatesthe potential impacts of public bodies'rationalization, and section four offers some caveats andconcluding remarks. Each section begins with a discussion ofthe reform background as well as the major supporters andopponents of the reform. The analysis in each section ispresented with the least possible amount of technicaldetails in order to maximize the appeal to a broaderaudience. For the interested reader, the methodologicaldetails of the empirical approaches employed in this reportare contained in the annexes.
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