H@rd Truths By GHK Lall – Guyana High-Income Economy

Jul 20, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – Guyana is moving up in the world.  The iconic World Bank has raised Guyana from a middle income to a ‘high income’ economy, with numbers to match.  In the scale that the World Bank uses, any country that has above US$13,845 per capita in Gross National Income (GNI) is one that has earned the distinction of being classified as a “high income” economy. When a super entity like the World Bank puts something like that out in public, I take off my scrimmage headgear, and bow in agreement. The Bank of Guyana is also asserting so, with The Magnificent [Oil] Province now joining the ranks of Barbados and the Bahamas, according to the BoG’s governor.  It is good to see that for the first time in a long time, the BoG governor is on the side of angels.  For good measure, I throw in that Guyana is now thought of in the same ‘high income’ manner when the US, the UK, and the UAE, are part of the conversation.

Now that everybody is on the same page, what does this elevation to a ‘high income’ mean?  Where does it leave the little citizen, people like me, now that we have progressed from ‘middle income to ‘high income’?  Regrets are in order because I have to prick the euphoria, collapse the bubble, in high quarters.

First of all, when Guyana was identified as ‘middle income’ (between US$4466 and US$13,845), per capita, as in per person, or per head, there were a huge number of citizens here, who had no idea how to get to that lower number, how to experience what it is like to be in the million-dollar range using local money.  They were not earning anything near to US$4466 a year, nor was any kind of total stipend bringing them to that rung on the ladder.  In brief, when Guyana was in the World Bank’s prior categorization of ‘middle income’ a great many here were outside of that righteous financial circle.  Like the largest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and richest country in the world and now GNI, the citizens who found themselves crowded into the bottom floor of the local economic house, missed all those buses, including this last one from the World Bank.  To put things rather crudely, Guyana is calculated and add up to these astronomical sums, but most Guyanese are nothing but bums.  Oil bums.  Statistical bums.  Financial bums without a dime to their account.  I am sorry if I offended anyone.

We are leading the pack with the best numbers, with the hallowed World Bank just chipping in with another bright one, and our people (save for the fewest of the few) are in a slumber, with more sentenced to a grim national economic chamber by the day.  That was when Guyana was ‘middle income; so now think of this.  To cross that magical high-income threshold of US$13,845, Indigenous communities, out of favour political communities, and outlier communities in the environment have to die and be born again.  No economic miracle is touching their lives. By the way, I am not speaking of 10,000 Guyanese on the outside, but likely hundreds of thousands of citizens.

US$13,845 is approximately GY$2,800,000 in GNI per person per annum.  To make matters simple, I squeeze this to GY$2,500,000 per person per year.  How many in Guyana are kissing that lovely figure, able to wrap their loving arms around it?  Even if I were to take the liberty of messing around with the august World Bank figures and scales, and reduce the GNI per person to GY$2,000,000 a year, how many Guyanese can raise their hand and claim that they are earning GY$150,000-165,000 a month?  To ask and respond, this is the severe problem with averages and generalized figures that, indeed, connect to the panoramic (35,000 feet) reality of Guyana, but still do not capture the world that is going on in the bushes and weeds.  That is where the hurting and struggling and agonizing in Guyana are living and licking their wounds, with due regard to the World Bank high-income flag in which this country is now wrapped.

Yes, we are getting more money flowing into this country from oil related activities.  But since I am the one putting the nasty, dirty, questions on the table, at whose door does the cream and cow of those activities stop, park, and fill up the registers and vaults?  It the same set of people all the time: the less than 1% in Guyana’s population that that kind of World Bank money stick to in some shape of form.  When the countless multiples of the World Bank’s US$13,845 go to a few only in this society, then the floor sweepers and bottom feeders don’t feature as well in the figures.

Things distil to this in today’s Guyana: money flooding in.  Interest rates will be going up.  And the little Guyanese people, the masses, going down. When my brothers and sisters in the congested lower middle and low levels know what it is to taste, to be actually high-income, (even middle income) then that would be a cause for celebration.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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• GHK Lall, Gross National Income, H@rd Truths, income, Middle

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