When economists warn about the resource curse, they tend to describe it in macroeconomic terms. The exchange rate appreciates as oil revenues flood in, making the rest of the economy uncompetitive. Tradeable sectors decline. Skilled labour and capital concentrate in the resource industry. Inflation accelerates. The non-oil economy hollows out. This is what the textbooks call Dutch Disease, after the Netherlands experienced it following the discovery of natural gas in the 1960s.
By those measures, Guyana has done reasonably well. The exchange rate has been managed. Foreign currency reserves are defensible. Subsidies have softened the worst of the cost-of-living squeeze. Headline macroeconomic indicators project an image of competent stewardship that has kept the textbook version of Dutch Disease at bay. The government and its supporters point to these indicators as evidence that the country is handling its oil wealth well, and on those narrow measures they are not entirely wrong.
But the resource curse has more than one form, and the form that matters most in Guyana right now is not macroeconomic. It is institutional, and it arrives through a different door.
The Guyanese accountant and lawyer Christopher Ram has documented the institutional version with unusual precision in his recent commentary. The Thirteenth Parliament, elected on the first of September 2025, has sat three times in eight months. Of those three sittings, only one has transacted real legislative business. By any historical comparison with previous Parliaments since independence, this is the lowest level of parliamentary activity the country has recorded, by factors ranging up to six times the baseline. The deliberative function of the legislature has been, in Ram’s word, effectively suspended.
The consequences cascade. The standing committees that the Constitution and Standing Orders require, including the Public Accounts Committee, the Sectoral Committees on Natural Resources, Economic Services, Foreign Relations and Social Services, the Committee on Appointments, and the Constitutional Reform Commission, have not been appointed. The Public Accounts Committee, which by long-standing tradition is chaired by a member of the main Opposition and which is the only mechanism by which the legislature can examine years of Auditor General reports covering between four and five billion United States dollars of public expenditure since 2020, cannot meet because it does not exist. There is no functioning legislative scrutiny of how public money has actually been spent during the most consequential fiscal period in the country’s history.
This is the resource curse in its institutional form. Not a sickness of the exchange rate. A sickness of the accountability machinery. Oil revenues that should be flowing through deliberative processes flow instead through executive announcements. Cabinet decisions are made public before they are formally taken. Boards of state-owned enterprises are stacked with appointees whose primary qualification is political reliability. The constitutional protections that previous Parliaments observed, even imperfectly, have been quietly set aside.
For the business community, this matters concretely. Predictable institutions are the foundation of investment. When the legislature does not meet, when the Auditor General faces structural conflicts that nobody addresses, when major fiscal commitments are announced by executive declaration rather than through the budget process, the country is making itself less attractive to the very investors it claims to want. The watchdogs, domestic and foreign, that once raised institutional standards have largely gone quiet. Oil contracts and the revenue they generate have become more important than the deliberative processes that should govern them.
The country can change this. It requires the political class to recognise that institutional decay is more expensive than political convenience, and that the resource curse in its institutional form lasts longer than any electoral cycle.
