AND yet another very positive comment on Guyana’s economy, this time from a projected report on the individual CARICOM island states’ current economic status.

Released by the Region’s premier lending institution, the Caribbean Development Bank, via a press conference hosted by its president, Dr Warren Smith, Guyana’s economy is once again projected at around five per cent for 2013.
Sometime ago similar sentiments were echoed by the Managing Director of the Trinidad and Tobago Republic Bank when the latter official lauded the performance portfolio of the local subsidiary of the Bank.
What was very revealing in the CDB head’s assessment of individual island economies, is that Barbados, once seen a perfect example of a well managed economy, is in dire straits at the moment, grappling with a high employment rate of 12.2 per cent. Even oil-rich Trinidad and Tobago is having a difficult time.
A cluster of seven island economies were described as having “unsustainable debt”, with the need to effect “corrective policy action.” Among the other advice offered by the CDB report were measures at improving the collection of tax arrears and pursing “programmes with high development impact and cost minimisation.”
One must surely empathise with these island economies status at the moment, since they are still battling the effects of the global crisis, still very much in evidence. One has only to observe the still conservative numbers as they relate to tourist arrivals in the individual islands and hotel occupancy levels.
But Guyana has been extremely fortunate because their country is governed by an administration whose sin qua non of governance has been to manage an economy in an efficient manner for the benefit of the nation and its peoples. Apart from modernising the systems through which business is done in Guyana, the nation’s tax system, of pivotal importance to any state’s economic development, is very efficient in its garnering of this vital source of revenue.
The truth about Guyana’s confident economic status is that its planners have executed the right programmes in a consistently sustainable manner with the all important ability to attract both local and foreign investments, a pathway which the CDB Report has pointed out that is necessary through governments taking “corrective policy action”.
Thus for all of the naysayers and doomsday prophets, the Guyana economy continues to be consistent and on the move. Therefore, Guyanese must feel a great sense of pride in their government’s ability to manage their economy so well.