Latest update April 30th, 2026 12:30 AM
Latest News
- World Bank urges Guyana to guard against volatile revenues and spending surges
- U.S. Ambassador says American companies need peace of mind in Guyana
- Trump vows to maintain Iran blockade, Tehran threatens ‘practical’ action
- Man gets $8M for spending 80 days in jail wrongfully
- ‘Sue cops who demand bribes’ – AG Nandlall urges
A very pertinent and intellectually stimulating discussion
Dear Editor,
Congratulations to Mr. A. Donald Augustine for introducing a very pertinent and intellectually stimulating discussion.
I heard the name A. Donald Augustin perviously, while attending UG, as someone who excelled as an economist in Guyana. If I recall correctly he was at the State Planning Secretariat or Ministry of Finance…never did get to meet him.
This is a very timely piece and a very good discussion away from the run of the mill discussions. I don’t agree with Gap, a SN blogger, about the value of the contribution by Mr. Augustine.
Gap1 is surely upset, and he has the right to be so, by the ‘cock brands’ we have running economic policies in Guyana and the many ‘wannabe economic commentators’ who write on economic matters and engage in technical discussions they do not have the intellectual foundation and knowledge base to discuss. Never the less, I do appreciate all points of views recognising that there is always some modicum of sense in the ‘crap’.
I ran through the report over the weekend and my initial thoughts were as follows:
* That this attempt is to measure without redundancy, and recognising the practical limitations to measurement, in happiness measures
* The discussion on national accounts, in particular, using consumption and income and disaggregated GDP measures, is timely particularly given the importance of balance sheet concepts through economic cycles
* That this new approach would include contributions (final goods and services) which were previously excluded because no market value was attached to labour, but marked significant value to the economy, e.g. household contribution like domestic housework by unemployed spouse or domestic worker (although paid)
* Whether this approach will address the per capita conundrum where it stands to reason that each and everyone has contributed equally to national income despite, my father is a goldsmith and yours is a subsistence farmer (paraphasing Walter Rodney) in the same country/geographical place.
Finally, in reference the per capita conundrum, it doesn’t address distributional issues in a national accounts sense per se but Stiglitz and Sen make the argument that more attention ought to be paid to income and wealth distribution. I don’t think in a national accounting sense it is possible to adjust for distribution without imposing a loss function which necessarily implies some sort of qualitative measure and that isn’t neutral, primarily because it embodies some norm about what constitutes a fair distribution.
See for example genuine progress indicator. Pure measures like Gini or Theil are discussed as dimensions of distribution but the real issue here is how we come up with the aggregate.
From a practical point of view, I think the approach should be to use multiple measures/concepts and apply deductive reasoning given the limited information…so we can capture each sector contribution…but then again we might run into standardization problems.
Let the discussion continue.
Evan Thomas
Share this:
Discover more from Kaieteur News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.