The Case for an Expanding Guyanese Middle Class

May 25, 2026 Features / Columnists, News

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By Karen Abrams, MBA, AA

(Kaieteur News) – Watch the restaurant scene in Georgetown long enough, and a pattern emerges. A new eatery opens. There is a flurry of excitement. And then, within months, the indicators of struggling business appears and in many cases, a closed sign shortly thereafter. The reason is not hard to find. The same small group of faces tends to flock to every new opening. In a country where international agencies describe a 48% to 58% poverty rate, the broader population simply does not yet have the disposable income to support a wide, varied and rapidly expanding consumer economy.

This is not a failure of culinary ambition. It is a symptom of a structural feature of the Guyanese economy that deserves a great deal more public discussion than it currently receives. Guyana does not yet have a middle class of the size and depth required to support a thriving non-oil consumer economy, and building one is among the most consequential national projects of the oil decade.

The data tell a clear story. According to International Labour Organization statistics published in 2024, Guyana’s minimum wage in purchasing power parity terms is fourth from the bottom of the CARICOM region, ahead only of Barbados, Suriname, and Haiti. The country sits atop one of the largest new oil discoveries of the century, yet on the wage indicator that most directly shapes household purchasing power, the country is still in the lower quartile of its regional peers. The opportunity to use this moment to reset that picture is exceptional, and the available fiscal headroom to do so has rarely been larger.  In other words, the nation is wealthy enough to get this done.

The structural pattern is well documented in the economic literature. Approximately 91 percent of Guyana’s exports by value are now crude oil, according to Harvard’s Atlas of Economic Complexity 2024,] and the oil sector contributes more than half of GDP according to recent Ministry of Finance and IMF data. The non-oil sectors, agriculture, manufacturing, retail, and hospitality, remain comparatively narrow. The development literature describes this concentration pattern as a familiar challenge facing resource-rich economies, and the country has the opportunity to address it deliberately during the period in which oil revenues are available to invest in broader productive capability.

Public sector compensation is one of the most direct levers for middle class expansion, and the data here also tell an important story. The Guyana Public Service Union called in January 2025 for a minimum public sector salary of GY$221,000, on the basis of its own cost-of-living analysis. Demerara Waves reported in the same month that at least 40 percent of public servants take home GY$140,000 or less after statutory deductions. Our teachers, nurses, police, soldiers, and civil servants are the foundation of the public goods on which all of us depend. There is a strong economic case, in addition to the ethical case, for ensuring that this group is supported through a sustained period of real wage growth.

Global oil prices have moved sharply higher through 2026, and ECLAC reported in April 2026 that the average price of oil in the first three weeks of that month was 74 percent above the December 2025 average.  The fiscal capacity to fund a middle-class expansion is, by any reasonable measure, available. The question is the political will to prioritise it. Targeted measures, a significant across-the-board public sector wage uplift, expanded household tax thresholds, reducing the VAT, deliberate procurement preferences for small Guyanese-owned firms, and structured wage supports for the lowest-paid private sector workers, are all within reach.

These wage supports can for example take the form of earned income tax credits. This is the best-known instrument internationally. The United States Earned Income Tax Credit, the United Kingdom Working Tax Credit, and similar schemes in Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand all share the same logic. A low-paid worker files a tax return. The government calculates a credit based on earnings and household size. The credit either reduces the tax owed to zero or, more commonly, produces a refund that exceeds anything the worker paid in. The effect is to raise take-home income from low-wage work, making employment more attractive than unemployment and reducing in-work poverty. The American version transferred roughly seventy billion United States dollars annually to working households at last estimate.

A large middle class however, is not a luxury. It is the shock absorber of democratic life and the engine of consmer-led economic stability. Without it, a country can produce significant headline growth and still find that its non-oil economy struggles to thrive. With it, the entire architecture of a more diversified economy becomes possible. Restaurants stay open because customers can afford to eat in them. Small businesses survive their first three years because demand exists across a wider population. New firms launch because the local market can absorb their products before they need to export.  The private sector lobby groups should support this.

This is the most consequential window in Guyana’s modern history for this kind of intervention. The country has the resources, the talent, and the international attention to build a society in which oil wealth produces broad prosperity rather than narrow accumulation. Doing so will not happen by accident however. It requires deliberate policy choice and sustained political commitment over more than one electoral cycle.

The restaurants will close, or they will stay open, depending on what we collectively decide to build. The Guyanese people have been promised prosperity. We deserve a deliberate national plan to deliver it.

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• Guyanese, International Labour Organization, Karen Abrams, Middle Class, minimum wage

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