Reference is drawn to a letter authored by the Economic and Youth Policy Advisor to the Leader of the Opposition published in the Stabroek News’s edition of March 11, 2025, captioned, “Combined PPP/C budgets of 2023, 2024 and 2025 do not address poverty”. The author took issue with the supposed non-reference to the word “poverty” in the respective budget speeches, which he incorrectly surmised that the omission thereof equates to a void of measures and policies aimed at confronting poverty.
He then goes on to state that the Opposition has set a goal of completely eradicating poverty in the first few years of office.
Yet, he failed to articulate exactly how they intend to, and through what types of policies and/or programmes they are proposing to achieve 100% poverty eradication in just a “few” years.
He goes on to state that, “according to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) countries should aim to: By 2030, reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions. If Guyana is already spending what it would have been spending in 2040, far beyond the UN 2030 target date, we should have already halved poverty in this country”.
While referencing the UN’s SDGs, he failed to acknowledge that in 2023, Guyana recorded an improved score of 67.4 compared with 61.9 in 2018, following the UN’s 2nd voluntary national review of the SDGs. The SDG index score signifies a country’s position between the worst (0) and best (100) outcomes and can be interpreted as the percentage of achievement. Guyana’s overall index score of 67.4 suggests that the country is on the way to the best possible outcome across the 17 SDGs. Additionally, the UN Human Development Index Report (2023/2024) places Guyana at 95 out of 193 countries with a HDI value of 0.742 (2022), an improvement over 2012 from 0.633.
Suffice it to state, during the 2015-2020 period when the APNU+AFC was in government, their economic model was designed to bankrupt the economy in the shortest possible timeframe, with high unemployment rates owing to their deliberate policies, coupled with the increased tax burden to both households and firms, thereby increasing the cost of doing business by more than three-fold in some instances. In fact, during the 2015-2020 period, growth in credit to the private sector were at record low levels, non-performing loans in the banking sector were at record high levels, the non-oil economy was virtually destroyed owing to the APNU+AFC’s catastrophic, contractionary economic policies, unemployment was on the rise, non-oil exports were on the decline, the Bank of Guyana net foreign sector assets and reserves were depleted at a record fast rate to under two-months of import cover, government deposit accounts went from surplus balances in excess of $60 billion, to overdrawn balances in excess of $100 billion, and more than $400 billion of public monies remained unaccounted for and unlawfully expended.
This is not an exhaustive list of fiscal mismanagement and economic regression that characterized the APNU+AFC’s tenure during the 2015-2020 period, rather these are merely key highlights to summarize that period. Notwithstanding the foregoing, for the sake of argument, let’s return to the main argument by the Opposition’s economic czar, that because the budget speeches did not mention “poverty”, that those budgets were void of pro-poor policies. Just to demonstrate how foolish this notion is, let’s look at the themes for budgets 2023, 2024 and 2025:
• Budget 2023: “improving lives today, building prosperity for tomorrow”,
• Budget 2024: “staying the course: building prosperity for all”, and
• Budget 2025: “a secure, prosperous and sustainable Guyana”.
Point of emphasis herein is the key word common in all three years’ budget themes, which was “prosperity”. Prosperity is the antonym for poverty. In simple terms, a budget and thusly an economic model that aims to build, create, expand and secure a prosperous nation, is just another way of saying, “lifting those who are in poverty, out of poverty, and those who are already out of poverty, to become more prosperous.” It’s that simple, nonetheless it is apparently extraordinarily complex and beyond the processing capacity for the comprehension of the Opposition’s czar (s) combined intellectual faculties.
In the interest of brevity, an economic model that seeks to eradicate poverty is a model that would constitute multiple pillars that focus on: (i) education, this is why the government has made tertiary education free effective this year, coupled with the GOAL scholarship programme. And not only free education―but making education accessible throughout the country, inter alia, different mediums as well as investing in the physical and technological infrastructure in order to do so; (ii) access to good quality and free public health care services, another area in which government is investing heavily; (iii) direct transfer of wealth through affordable and subsidized home ownership; and (iv) investing in the economic diversification of the economy to create new opportunities that will, in turn, create jobs, better quality jobs for the people, and this is why investing in the transformational projects and public infrastructure are of paramount importance towards achieving this goal.
Guyana’s poverty rate has more than halved since 1992, down from >90% to less than 30% according to unofficial estimates. In substantiation of this view and in lieu of an up-to-date credible study on the true state of poverty in Guyana, one can deduce empirical insights from a few select indicators, such as: income levels, consumption expenditure, home ownership, vehicle ownership (exclusively motor cars), individual savings in the banking sector, personal loans, real estate mortgages, and job creation. Space, however, precludes a more detailed analysis in this respect, which I would be happy to examine in a subsequent article.
With all of that being said, it is evident that poverty alleviation underpins the core and fundamental pillar of the PPP/C’s Government overarching economic development model, which is yielding positive results thus far.