PLEASE allow me the space to point out a few salient points that Guyanese should not shrug off when they speak about this country’s economic and financial standing during this administration. Guyana has seen significant investment under the regime of the Jagdeo Administration with the promotion of foreign direct investments as a means of bolstering the economic development of the country.
Poverty reduction, capacity building and the creation of employment have long been some of the pillars of the national development strategy.  In recent years we have seen this played out on a national stage.
Government has always been strong on sustainable development, economic equity and social justice for all our people and has always committed to enhancing social services and opportunities for the Guyanese people.
Through the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, huge sums of money that were spent on debt servicing were converted to poverty reduction, economic growth and job creation in our society.
The global financial meltdown has severely affected the global trade and financial relations, altering it to the detriment of small and developing countries like ours.  All of our traditional export products have been hard hit.
But government’s programme managed to salvage what could have been a disastrous situation for Guyana, as many of the Caribbean states and others in the wider world can testify.
Guyana has managed to maintain its stability in our macro-economy and has seen not insignificant growth rates compared with the average growth of the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Government has also continuously tried and succeeded in securing foreign investment and much work has been done to attract these investors in several new sectors.
The Jagdeo Administration has always maintained a clear vision of the future and has always held at the helm the importance of crafting strategies for every area of activity such as infrastructure, transportation, social development, industry, tourism, energy, telecommunication, to name a few.
Mr. Jagdeo has always envisioned an economic plan for Guyana whereby the restructuring of the traditional sector so as to enhance their productivity and competitiveness has always held import.
This is in addition to moving rapidly into new industries, in keeping the flow of the world economy whereby new areas of wealth are coming to the fore such as the services sector, information technology, capital flows and more specifically to Guyana, the use of local resources for value added production.
Government’s policy has always been to include the private sector in promoting the right environment that has, over the years, seen businesses flourish and new ones develop.
Some of the measures that have impacted significantly on this are –  a stable macro-economic climate, an educated and trainable work force, zero-rate on Custom Duty and Consumption Tax on plant, machinery, equipment and raw materials in the productive sectors, double taxation treaties with some countries; export allowance for non-traditional exports up to 75 percent; special incentive package for tourism and depressed areas; and modern legislation in the financial sector are just among several initiatives.
Several factors over the years, including the El Nino and La Nina weather phenomena, have adversely affected the production of sugar, rice and other forestry products, reduced access to lucrative external markets for our basic commodities, especially rice; political instabilities following the December 1997 elections, among a number of others.
But our economy has bounced back, investments continue to grow and there are visible signs of this!