Guyana’s remarkable transformation has once again positioned the oil-booming nation as a leader of economic progress in the Caribbean and Latin America.
The government cited a recently published World Bank Report, that states Caribbean economies will accelerate to 7.1 per cent in 2024 and remain robust at 5.7 per cent in 2025.
Central to this optimistic outlook is Guyana, whose economy continues to benefit from a resource-based revolution following the exploration of oil in 2015.
The report projects a 33.4 per cent growth in the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by the end of 2024.
With this oil and gas wealth Guyana is now ranked the world’s fastest growing economy and with the highest GDP per capita. In 2024, Guyana’s Budget is $1.146 trillion, the largest in history and the largest of all budgets combined since the country began self-government in 1966. This year Guyana is expected to earn approximately US$2.8 Billion in oil and gas revenue.
In the midst of burgeoning wealth almost half the population live on less than US$ 5.50 per day, that is equivalent to G$1200 per day. This is according to a recent World Bank Fact sheet on Guyana.
The fact sheet also pointed out the underperformance of Guyana’s education and health care systems. Infrastructure and services delivery are shoddy at best.
Public sector workers, including the Disciplined Services, are grossly underpaid. Critical professionals like nurses and teachers are emigrating for better wages and working conditions. Instead of paying local nurses more to reduce the movement outflow, the government announced it would import nurses from Bangladesh. The Bangladeshi nurses’ employment packages are relatively better than the local nurses.
Guyana’s public school teachers are on strike since February. Their demand through their union, the Guyana Teachers Union, for respect of their right to collective bargaining continues to be ignored.
The Union since August 2020 submitted a multi-year proposal to government, and every year since, with no success. The court on April 19 upheld the teachers’ right to collective bargaining. The government has since appealed a decision that favours Guyana’s 15, 000 public school teachers.
Last week the government announced plan to distribute cash grants to parents of children in the public school system to go to private school. This policy not only underscores government intent to break the back of the teachers and Union but what would be another massive transfer of state wealth to allies.
The opposition, A Partnership for National Unity and Alliance for Change (APNU+AFC), has repeatedly flayed the uneven distribution of Guyana’s wealth and the governing People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) preference to their “friends, favourites and family.”
