Guyana is not insulated from global turbulence. But global shocks are not a new phenomenon. Commodity-price swings, higher shipping costs, geopolitical disruptions and imported inflation have repeatedly passed through into domestic prices, production and household welfare—especially in a small, import-dependent economy. Our own economic experience bears this out: Guyana has had to manage successive external and domestic shocks across different periods, long before the advent of oil revenues. For these reasons, policymakers (politicians) do not have the luxury of presenting every external shock as though it were unprecedented, or of relying on familiar global pressures to mask underperformance in critical areas, lower the bar for results or excuse below-par economic stewardship. In the scarcity era (1992-2011), the government was judged while managing crises with little fiscal room; in the abundance era, government must be judged against the extraordinary capacity now available to anticipate, absorb and overcome them. The issue is no longer simply whether shocks occur, but whether political leadership has built the buffers, productive capacity and institutions needed to confront them decisively. Abundance brings harder scrutiny, higher expectations and a substantially elevated standard of accountability. It requires a fundamental rethink of the machinery of governance and economic management around one unavoidable question: with more resources than any administration before it, how will the State produce results that are measurable, impactful and lasting?
That question is best understood through the contrast between two periods in Guyana’s economic history: the scarcity era and the abundance era.
For much of our modern economic history—especially throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and into 2011—Guyana operated in what I call the scarcity era. There were no petroleum revenues, foreign-exchange buffers were limited and the Government had very little fiscal room. Yet the country had to contend with successive external and domestic shocks: commodity-price volatility, imported inflation, adverse terms-of-trade movements, the 2005 floods—which caused damage estimated at nearly 60% of GDP—and the 2008–09 global financial crisis. Scarcity did not produce faster growth, but it demonstrated resilience under severe constraint. Guyana absorbed that succession of shocks without the extraordinary financial capacity available today.
Today, Guyana is in an abundance era. Oil revenues have created fiscal space that earlier governments could scarcely imagine. That changes the standard completely. The abundance era requires a substantial elevation not only in the quality of governance and execution, but also in the standard of public debate and policy analysis applied to these issues. Imported inflation and global shocks may explain part of the pressure, but they cannot explain away weak domestic food supply, slowing manufacturing, strained logistics or inadequate implementation. With unprecedented resources, Guyana should be building stronger buffers, more resilient agriculture and infrastructure, better supply-side adaptation and institutions capable of turning external shocks into temporary disruptions rather than recurring explanations for structural weakness.
This is the political and economic contrast that cannot be evaded: earlier administrations confronted floods, commodity shocks and a global financial crisis without oil revenues, with limited buffers and with far less institutional and fiscal capacity. Today’s administration governs with the largest resource envelope in Guyana’s history. It cannot reasonably ask to be judged by the same standard, still less by a lower one. Where scarcity constrained what government could do, abundance expands both its power and its responsibility. External shocks may explain pressure, but they cannot become a political shield for weak domestic supply, delayed execution or institutional underperformance. The legitimate public test is therefore uncompromising: if the State now commands vastly greater resources, citizens are entitled to demand vastly better preparedness, implementation, resilience and outcomes.
The first half of 2026 provides an important test of that proposition.
Official non-oil growth reached a strong 10.1%, but construction and mining carried much of that momentum. Agriculture contracted, manufacturing slowed sharply and services lost pace. The part of the economy that most directly produces food, manufactured goods and broad-based services grew by only about 4.2%. In ordinary terms, the economy is getting bigger, but the productive foundation beneath it is not strengthening at the same speed.
This weakness reaches directly into the cost of living.
Consumer prices rose 4.4% in six months, while food prices increased 6.7%. When incomes, money in circulation and public spending rise faster than local farms and factories can expand supply, the additional demand does not disappear. It is increasingly satisfied through imports, leaving families more exposed to overseas prices, freight costs and exchange-rate movements.
This is why more disposable income does not automatically mean more purchasing power. Disposable income is the money a household has available to spend; purchasing power is what that money can actually buy. If wages, transfers or other income rise by 5%, but food, rent, transport and utilities rise by 7%, the household may have more dollars in hand while being able to afford less. Economic progress therefore cannot be judged only by how much cash reaches households. It must also be judged by whether domestic production, competition and productivity keep essential goods and services affordable.
This is also how the resource-curse risk can begin—not necessarily with economic collapse, but during a boom. It appears when opportunities become concentrated, imports absorb too much of the spending, and large expenditures create activity without building enough competitive local capacity. The warning is not that Guyana has failed. It is that abundance can be consumed without being fully converted into resilience.
The same test must be applied to public investment.
Guyana’s public investment programme is enormous, but success cannot be measured by how much was budgeted, announced or spent. It must be measured by what the money actually changed. Did drainage reduce crop losses? Did roads lower transport costs? Did electricity investment reduce outages and manufacturing costs? Did incentives create exporters, stronger supply chains and private investment? Spending is only the input; better living standards and a stronger economy are the outcomes.
The answer is neither austerity nor less ambition. It is disciplined ambition: select projects carefully, sequence spending to the country’s ability to deliver, open opportunities more widely, help local firms graduate into larger and more competitive businesses, and tie support to measurable improvements in yields, productivity, skills, exports and value added. Oil gives us a powerful but finite window. It must be used to build the economy that will carry Guyana after oil-funded demand begins to fade.
The bottom-line stewardship test is simple.
Guyana’s progress is real, but progress alone cannot settle the political argument. The decisive question is whether today’s abundance is producing materially greater resilience than yesterday’s scarcity. A government entrusted with unprecedented revenues must deliver more than larger budgets, announcements and visible activity; it must deliver a demonstrably stronger economy. Are we lowering the cost of producing locally? Are we strengthening agriculture and manufacturing? Are more Guyanese businesses acquiring the capacity to compete? Are households merely receiving more disposable income, or is that income generating stronger purchasing power after food, housing, transport and other living costs? And when the next shock arrives, will the country be measurably less vulnerable—or will abundance again be defended by explanations that scarcity-era governments could also have offered?
Abundance becomes transformation only when it builds the productive strength, institutions and resilience that scarcity never allowed us to afford. That is the central economic challenge of this generation.
Notwithstanding these risks, Guyana is broadly on the right track in terms of policy direction and the development agenda. The country is investing in the right areas—transport, drainage, energy, housing, education, health, digitalisation and support for productive sectors. The central concern is not that the Government is doing the wrong things, but whether the right things are being implemented fast enough, efficiently enough and to the required standard.
The greatest risk—and the Government’s most difficult challenge—is execution. The rate of implementation must improve, while the economy’s absorptive capacity—its ability to convert very large budgets into completed, high-quality projects—must expand. Persistent project delays raise costs, postpone benefits and intensify competition for contractors, engineers, materials and labour. Better project preparation, coordination, supervision and management are therefore essential, together with a stronger and more transparent focus on value for money.
Procurement concentration must also be confronted through a modernised system that broadens access, strengthens competition and helps capable local firms graduate into larger opportunities. Accelerating e-procurement is central to that reform. More broadly, Guyana must increasingly deploy digital technology and artificial intelligence across project design, procurement, monitoring, public administration and service delivery. Used responsibly, these tools can shorten the development lag, identify bottlenecks earlier, improve accountability and generate the productivity gains needed to make the abundance era work.
This is where the challenge now lies, and where greater policy attention must be concentrated: implementation speed, institutional capacity, infrastructure quality, project management, procurement reform, value for money and productivity. Guyana has chosen the broad direction of development. The decisive task is to strengthen the machinery required to deliver it—and to ensure that this extraordinary period of abundance leaves behind an economy more productive, more resilient and more affordable for every Guyanese household.
Why am I saying this? Not because transformation is not happening. It is happening. The issue is how concentrated it is, how quickly it is reaching across the economy and how efficiently the governance machinery is converting the resources into results. That is where the challenge lies. We are approaching the first year of the Government’s second term, which will be reached in November. That means we have approximately 4.4 years left to shift gear and re-engineer the economic governance apparatus. In practical terms, that leaves a relatively narrow window for reforms of this scale to take root and produce results. If the procurement concentration, speed and efficiency issues are not addressed now, the years will pass quickly and we may reach the end of the term with major progress, but still not having spread the gains widely enough or moved with the speed and efficiency that this period of abundance demands. That is the reality we have to confront now.