“...he will be the guardian and interpreter of Jamaica’s fiscal rules, and will be required to monitor adherence to these rules and provide independent assessment of budgetary outcomes in addition to independent analysis.”
Dr. Nigel Clarke, IMF Deputy Managing Director, former Jamaican Finance Minister.
FISCAL COMMISSIONER
Courtney Williams, a son of St. Elizabeth and a Munro College Old Boy, is a career economist and dedicated public servant committed to leverage his extensive local and international experience and training in macroeconomic policy to help advance Jamaica’s growth and development.
He is a fiscal policy specialist who started his public sector career in 1995 at the Ministry of Finance as the Senior Fiscal Economist in the Fiscal Policy Management Unit (FPMU).
By 2005, he was Senior Director of the FPMU and served in that capacity until 2016.
In 2008, Mr. Williams spearheaded the development and implementation of Jamaica’s Fiscal Responsibility Framework, a landmark reform that has been emulated by other Caribbean countries and attracted praise on a global level.
During his tenure at the FPMU, he also directed the management of fiscal operations that ensured Jamaica’s strong performance under programmes supervised by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other multilateral agencies.
In 2016 he was seconded to the International Monatry Fund (IMF) in Washington, D.C. for three and a half years, where he served as Senior Advisor to the Executive Director for Canada, Ireland, and the Caribbean. In this capacity he represented Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines at the IMF’s Executive Board, and accompanied the IMF mission delegation that periodically visited Jamaica to assess the country’s performance during the successful transition from an Extended Fund Facility (EFF) programme to a 3-year precautionary Stand By Arrangement (SBA).
On his return to Jamaica, Mr. Williams was appointed Deputy Financial Secretary, Ministry of Finance & the Public Service in charge of technical advisory coordination. In this role, he oversaw the development and execution of the COVID-19 Allocation of Resources for Employees (CARE) Programme, Jamaica’s groundbreaking socio-economic intervention package, which benefitted close to five hundred thousand people.
Mr Williams was appointed Permanent Secretary, Ministry of National Security, in October 2020. He served in that capacity until he transitioned back to the economics and finance arena by becoming Jamaica’s first Fiscal Commissioner on May 1, 2023.
The bulk of his working life has been in the field of economics and finance, as after leaving Munro College in 1986, his very first job was with the Bank of Nova Scotia, where he worked for three years before moving onto university. After completing his Bachelor of Science in Economics and Management from the University of the West Indies (UWI), he worked for a short while as a trainee manager at Citizen’s Bank before starting his public sector career at the Ministry of Finance and Planning.
Mr. Williams won Bank of Jamaica’s G. Arthur Brown Scholarship in 1994 to pursue a Master’s degree in Economics at the UWI. Personal challenges, however, dictated his return to work, and so he never completed the scholarship programme. He later made time to pursue post-graduate studies, earning a Certificate in Tax Analysis and Revenue Forecasting from Harvard University in 1997, and a Master’s in International Affairs, with specialization in economic policy management, from Columbia University, New York, in 1999.
Mr. Williams has previously served on the Boards of the Export-Import (EXIM) Bank of Jamaica, the Statistical Institute of Jamaica, and the Betting, Gaming & Lotteries Commission. He also served on the United Nations Committee on Contributions from 2009 to 2011.
He dabbled in playing hockey at UWI, but the main sports he follows now are cricket and track and field, in addition to being an unyielding Liverpool supporter in football.