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Guyana lacks labour force capacity to handle development – Economist
– says country needs at least 100,000 more workers
By Renay Sambach
Kaieteur News – Given that Guyana’s oil resources has placed it among the top petroleum producers in the world, and the rapid rate at which the country’s oil and gas sector has been accelerating, the country’s lack of technical expertise continues to be a bugbear to local development.
Executive member of GCCI and economist, Richard Rambarran.
Despite Guyana’s lack of expertise to handle the fast rate of development, the Government of Guyana recently gave American oil giant, ExxonMobil, the green light for the fourth project, the US$10B Yellowtail Development Project and Vice President, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, has been pushing for oil companies to go faster.
In this regard, Richard Rambarran, an economist and executive member of the Georgetown Chambers of Commerce and Industry (GCCI), recently said, “Even if we take all of the persons in Guyana who are unemployed, underemployed and even those, the ones that we call in labour economics, disguised unemployed, we still do not have enough persons in this country to serve the productive growth sector or where we are intended to grow over the medium term.”
Rambarran remarks were forthcoming while he was a guest on Kaieteur Radio’s Guyana’s Oil and You programme which focused on the topic, “Key mechanisms for maximizing our oil economy.”
The economist was one of the key authors for the report titled, “Planning for Prosperity: Labour Migration and Guyana’s Emerging Economy.”
He revealed that part of his research has demonstrated that the greatest contributor from an economic modeling perspective is the people of the country and that it is factual that it is the people that drive the growth of a country.
Rambarran explained, “Now it only serves as a logical extension that if you have a sector that would mammoth your economy in the form of the oil and gas sector, the financial capital that is being injected into that sector, only serves for the sector directly or for the supporting sector and you will need more persons.”
To this end, he added that what he has recognised is that the government needs to ensure that it is channelling the resources from Guyana’s labour market into productive sectors and they also need to ensure that as many people as possible that can be employed, should be employed.
He continued by stating that as many people as possible from the working age population, should get into the productive sector even as he pointed out that it is also important for the improvement of the country’s labour force participation rate.
Rambarran highlighted that from the research, it was gathered that based on where Guyana is going in the medium term, the country will still require all of those persons who are unemployed, underemployed and disguised unemployed to enter into the labour market and in addition to that about 100,000 more persons will still be needed.
“So we need everybody, everyone in this country to have a job, participate in the formal structure in the economy but also we need 100, 000 more people,” the economist said.
According to him, the report also found that the country needs to improve its institutional capacity to handle migrant labour or to handle migrant workers, and the need to establish a labour market centre.
Moreover, Rambarran was asked if he believes that with the explosive development that is going to take place as a result of the oil and gas resources, and the time that it will take to bridge the educational gap because of how technical the sector is, if he believes Guyana will run the risk of having an expat manage the oil and gas sector.
He responded, “Within a country’s development firstly, they can never be absolute certainty on any particular point. I can never say with complete confidence or with 100 percent certainty that, that will not happen.”
On April 4, last, Kaieteur News reported that during a discussion on the US$1.3B gas-to-shore project, Financial Analyst, Joel Bhagwandin, stated that despite Guyana being blessed with bountiful resources, what the country lacks is the critical human resources, which he highlighted is a deterrent to the country’s development.
According to him, one reason for Guyana not having people resources is due to political instability. “People fled, people fled because of the lack of opportunities,” he pointed out.
Bhagwandin then added, “So to validate this argument that I am putting forward here, if you look at our last labour force survey, less than five percent of our labour force has an education at the tertiary level.”
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