The recent public relations parade touting Guyana’s declining debt-to-GDP ratio, featured in both the government’s budget speeches and echoed by the UN’s ECLAC reports, paints a dangerously incomplete and misleading picture of economic reality.
Yes, Guyana’s GDP has surged. And yes, the debt-to-GDP ratio has dropped from 47.4% in 2020 to 24.3% in 2024. But these numbers deserve deeper scrutiny. They are buoyed almost entirely by one factor: foreign oil revenues flowing through the country, but not to it. Guyana is a textbook case of what economists call “GDP without GNP”, growth on paper, but without national prosperity.
Guyana’s so-called economic transformation is being underwritten by multinational oil giants who are extracting billions of dollars in offshore oil wealth, immediately repatriating the revenues to overseas bank accounts, and leaving behind local debt for Guyanese citizens to repay. The GDP numbers swell with every barrel pumped, but the national benefit remains elusive.
What the ECLAC report and Minister Singh conveniently ignore is that Guyana earns a small fraction of every barrel extracted. ExxonMobil and its partners are walking away with windfall profits, while Guyana, despite being the source of the wealth, is forced to borrow to build bridges, hospitals, and highways.
And where do those borrowed billions end up? Often in overpriced, opaque infrastructure contracts and loans to be paid back, with interest, by Guyanese taxpayers and their children. The wealth flows out. The debt stays in.
It is economic malpractice to praise a shrinking debt-to-GDP ratio without discussing debt per capita, which is the more honest indicator of national burden. Guyana’s public debt of nearly US$6 billion, when distributed across a population of just over 800,000, translates into a staggering debt burden of roughly US$7,500 per citizen, higher than several CARICOM peers with far more diversified economies and better social safety nets.
GDP growth in Guyana is not lifting all boats. It’s lifting corporate yachts.
The ruling PPP/C continues to invoke the 1990s-era debt crisis under the PNC to deflect from the current unsustainable borrowing. But that narrative is stale. The issue isn’t how much Guyana owes relative to GDP, it’s how little Guyana earns from the engine supposedly powering that GDP. That’s the perverse irony.
What we are witnessing is a form of modern-day economic extraction dressed up in spreadsheets. Foreign oil firms rake in untaxed profits. Government officials benefit from corrupt contracts and then celebrate meaningless ratios. Meanwhile, schools crumble, healthcare gaps widen, and the debt ledger grows, quietly, per citizen, and per child. Long after Ashni Singh and Bharrat Jagdeo have left the political sphere, your grandchildren will be paying exorbitant and suffocating taxes to aid the country in repaying loans which the PPP government officials are racking up today.
Borrowing billions while exporting national wealth is not fiscal responsibility, it is a betrayal of future generations. By the time these debts mature, the oil will be gone. And all that will remain is a barren seabed and billions in interest payments.
The real question for Guyana is not how high your GDP has risen, but how low your share of the oil pie remains, and whether anyone in government has the courage to renegotiate the contracts, rethink the debt binge, and reinvest oil proceeds into true national wealth: education, skills, infrastructure, and ownership.
Until then, no debt ratio, no matter how mathematically impressive, can hide the economic truth.
