Between 2021 and 2025, the government’s expansionary economic policies, coupled with strategic public investments in the infrastructure and social services sectors, led to the creation of approximately 70,000 sustainable jobs in the economy.
This is according to Financial Analyst Joel Bhagwandin, Director of SphereX Professional Services Inc., in a recent report analysing the growing economy’s contribution to local job creation.
He noted that the current administration exceeded its 2020 manifesto target of 50,000 jobs despite the exclusion of employment contributions from the manufacturing and services sub-sectors, along with unaccounted expatriate labour.
This information, according to Bhagwandin, is corroborated by the estimated 67,905 new employees registered between the ages of 16 to 59 with the National Insurance Scheme (NIS).
He noted that the agriculture, forestry and fishing industries; mining and quarrying; manufacturing; construction; wholesale and retail trade; transportation and storage; and accommodation and food services sectors combined accounted for 83 per cent of total employment in 2021 — or 239,904 persons.
Together, these sectors recorded a 49.8 per cent growth between 2020 and 2024, with the construction sector accounting for the highest at 180 per cent, followed by accommodation and food services at 153 per cent, the wholesale and retail sectors at 83 per cent, transport and storage at 81 per cent, manufacturing at 57 per cent, mining and quarrying (excluding the petroleum sector) at 15 per cent, and the agriculture, fishing and forestry sector at 20 per cent.
With the aforementioned in mind, approximately 75,572 persons benefited from job creation and capacity-building activities undertaken by the Guyana government in the agriculture sector. Another 7,300 jobs were created in the tourism and hospitality sector on account of the targeted policies aimed at stimulating and incentivising investments and job creation in this sector.
Given the exponential growth in the construction sector, as previously alluded to, of 180 per cent between 2020 and 2024, Bhagwandin said this growth would have been driven by the housing sector — targeting the distribution of 50,000 house lots, the expansion of existing housing schemes, developing new housing schemes to facilitate the construction of new homes, private sector development, and public investment in roads, bridges, health, education, and sports infrastructure across the country — thereby enabling the creation of conservatively over 30,000 jobs assuming that each project; over 6,300 contracts administered through public tendering, generated an average of five new jobs.
By extrapolating from banking sector data, residential mortgages increased by 70 per cent, rising from $90 billion in 2020 to $153 billion in 2024.
“This growth can be approximated to the construction of 5,000 low-income homes during this period. This, in turn, translates to an average of 1000 housing units constructed per annum,” Bhagwandin said.
Assuming that the construction of each housing unit generated employment for at least five persons per unit, this equates to an estimated total workforce of 25,000 persons in the housing construction sub-sector, he submitted.
He noted that by employing a methodological approach — anchored in the 2021 Third Quarter Guyana Labour Force Survey and sector-specific indicators — the government’s estimated creation of over 50,000 sustainable jobs is both plausible and conservative.
He concluded that “with the exclusion of employment contributions from the manufacturing and services sub-sectors, along with unaccounted expatriate labour,” suggests that actual employment figures may be even higher.