The Golding administration is a long way from delivering on its promise of "jobs, jobs, jobs" and too often the PM and some of his senior ministers come across as whinging and carping.

But, its blunders notwithstanding, it can't be said, as some of its critics contend, that after a year in office, the Jamaica Labour Party administration has been overly bad. It certainly is no disaster and neither, all things being equal, has it performed worse than its People's National Party (PNP) predecessor.

Yet, this assessment may be an indictment, suggesting, as it does, that the Golding administration has been neither good nor bad, but merely mediocre.

This, of course, is not what was promised by Bruce Golding when he eventually wrested the leadership of the JLP from Edward Seaga and set out on the route to last September's election victory.

Severe challenges

But, to be fair to Mr Golding, his government has faced severe challenges along the way. It came to power on the tailend of a hurricane, Dean, that caused severe economic disruption. It ended its first year in office grappling with the aftermath of another, Gustav, that left billions worth of damage to infrastructure and dislocation to people's lives.

But hurricanes have not represented all of Mr Golding's troubles. Ill wind of another kind, in the form of spiralling costs for commodities, including oil, placed the Jamaican economy into a tailspin. Then, there is the the fallout from the subprime credit crisis, which has weakened the major global economies, including, critically, Jamaica's key markets for tourists and sources for the bulk of the cash Jamaicans living abroad tend to send home.

Among the results of these has been a sluggish economic performance in Jamaica, where point-to-point inflation for the year to end of July was 26.2 per cent. Rather than the 3.5 per cent growth forecast at the start of the fiscal year, the central bank recently lowered its best-case outlook to 2.2 per cent. With Gustav, things could be worse. Rising prices and lower growth has shown itself in an upward tick in unemployment, to 10.4 per cent in January and 9.4 per cent last October.

In the circumstance, it is not surprising that the problem of crime remains a crisis for the country and government.

Positive side

On the positive side, however, the Government was able to hold the fiscal deficit in 2007/2008 to 4.7 per cent of GDP and seems in line to meeting its deficit target for the current fiscal year of per cent of GDP. It has also been able to contain the growth of the country's debt to GDP ratio. In the face of difficulty, the economy has been kept afloat.

On the foreign policy front, Mr Golding has displayed admirable pragmatism, particularly in terms of relationships with Venezuela, Cuba and the Caribbean Community.

Where, perhaps, Mr Golding has fallen significantly short, has been in failing to scale the bar for governance he set himself while in opposition. He led us to believe that he would have been big and embracing of a sort of new moral core to the conduct of the people's business. Unfortunately, Mr Golding got off to a bad start in the handling of the Vasciannie affair and the firing of the Public Service Commission. It's, however, not too late to recover.