When Growth Doesn’t Create Competition

Jun 07, 2026 Features / Columnists, News

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Why more wealth does not automatically produce better service, lower prices, or broader opportunity

By Karen Abrams, Ed.D, MBA, AA

Dr. Karen Abrams writes a weekly column on technology, education, and business. She is a co-founder of STEMGuyana and Pathway Online Academy.

(Kaieteur News) – Last week, I argued that artificial intelligence is about to make customer service, trust, and brand more valuable than they have ever been because those are the things AI cannot easily replicate. I ended with a question; does our market in Guyana actually reward firms that compete on those things?

The answer reveals something important about our economy. Most Guyanese can recognise the symptoms: high prices, uneven service, limited responsiveness, and wages that often seem disconnected from the wealth being created around us. It is tempting to blame individual businesses, but the bigger issue is the structure of the market itself.

Two ideas help explain what is happening. The first is shallowness, a market with relatively few customers. The second is concentration, a market where a small number of firms control most of the supply. They are not the same thing, but they are closely connected. Small markets naturally limit the number of competitors that can survive, which often leads to concentration.

Smallness produces concentration. Concentration reduces competitive pressure. Competition is what normally pushes prices down, service quality up, wages higher, and innovation forward.

Consider banking. Opening a serious bank requires substantial fixed costs: capital, technology, compliance systems, branches, security, and staff. In Brazil, those costs can be spread across hundreds of millions of customers. In Guyana, they are spread across fewer than one million.

Historically, that reality favoured concentration. Oil, however, complicates the picture. Guyana remains a small country, but economic activity has expanded dramatically and banks are reporting record profits. If the economics have changed, why do many customers feel service standards have not improved at the same pace?

Part of the answer may be culture. For decades, businesses operated in an environment of genuine scarcity. Cost control often mattered more than customer experience. Customers had limited alternatives. Those habits became embedded in organisational culture. Oil changed the economy rapidly. Institutions tend to change much more slowly.

Many executives and managers are still making decisions through assumptions formed during a very different era. What was rational in a poorer Guyana may be less rational in a wealthier one. Yet organisations often continue operating according to old assumptions long after the conditions that created them have disappeared.

This pattern extends beyond banking. It appears in telecommunications, wholesale distribution, logistics, construction, media, and many other sectors where competition remains limited.

The consequences are visible throughout daily life. Consumers face high prices. Service improvements arrive slowly. New entrants struggle to gain scale. Entrepreneurs with innovative ideas often find themselves competing against firms with entrenched advantages.

International research supports these observations. The Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank have both linked shallow, concentrated markets to weaker innovation, lower productivity growth, higher markups, and slower improvements in wages and service quality.

Some readers may object that Guyana is growing rapidly and that growth itself should solve these problems. Growth certainly helps. But growth and competition are not the same thing. An economy can expand while remaining highly concentrated if the largest opportunities continue to be captured by a relatively small number of firms. The important question is not whether the economy is growing. The important question is whether enough firms are genuinely competing for the opportunities that growth creates.

This brings us back to artificial intelligence. Last week’s argument was that AI will make many technical capabilities easier and cheaper to access. Businesses will increasingly be able to generate competent software, marketing, customer communications, and operational processes using the same underlying technologies. As that happens, technical competence becomes less scarce.

The differentiators become the things AI cannot easily replicate: trust, relationships, customer service, reputation, responsiveness, and brand. Yet concentrated markets often weaken incentives to invest in exactly those qualities. If customers have few alternatives, firms face less pressure to improve. Service standards that would be unacceptable in highly competitive markets can persist for years. Organisations become comfortable. They optimise around what worked yesterday rather than what customers may demand tomorrow.

That complacency may become one of the greatest risks facing established firms in the AI era. The encouraging news is that AI is also lowering many traditional barriers to entry. Young entrepreneurs can build products, automate operations, and reach customers with fewer resources than previous generations required. At the same time, many sectors remain underserved in trust, service, transparency, and responsiveness. That creates an opening.

The entrepreneur who genuinely commits to quality and customer satisfaction may find themselves competing in territory that incumbents have never fully occupied. Policy matters as well. A country with fewer than one million people will always face the realities of a shallow domestic market. One of the most effective ways to address that challenge is to expand the size of the market itself.

This is why CARICOM integration matters. For Guyana, regional integration is not merely a diplomatic project. It is an economic strategy. A genuinely integrated CARICOM market would provide access to approximately seventeen million consumers instead of fewer than one million. Regional firms would compete more aggressively for Guyanese customers, while Guyanese businesses would gain access to larger markets. Competition would increase.

New entrants often bring different expectations around customer service, efficiency, and innovation. They force incumbents to adapt more quickly than they otherwise would.

The second policy tool is competition enforcement itself. Guyana already has a Competition and Consumer Affairs Commission. In a small economy, competition policy is not a luxury. It is one of the few tools available to offset the concentration that naturally emerges from market size. That requires resources, expertise, independence, and public support.

Here is where I want to land. AI is about to make the things only humans can do more valuable than ever, but the structure and culture of our economy are not yet fully designed to reward the firms that do them best. Fixing that is not solely the responsibility of entrepreneurs. It requires stronger competition, deeper regional integration, better institutions, and business leaders willing to challenge assumptions that were formed during a very different economic era.

The reservoir of wealth in Guyana is filling rapidly. The question is whether the benefits will circulate broadly through the economy or continue to pool in a relatively small number of firms. Widening those pipes is the work of this generation, not the next.

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• better service, broader opportunity, Karen Abrams, lower prices, Wealth

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