The Construction Boom is Not a Development Plan

Jun 28, 2026 Features / Columnists, News

---

By Dr. Karen Abrams, MBA, AA

(Kaieteur News) – Drive through Georgetown and the evidence of prosperity is everywhere you look. Cranes on the skyline. Hotels rising. Highways widening. Housing schemes spreading. Construction has become the visible face of the boom, and I understand why it inspires pride. After generations of making do, we are finally building. I feel it too.

But I want to ask a careful question this week, and I ask it as a friend of the building, not an opponent.

What happens after the ribbon is cut?

The World Bank’s April 2026 update on our region contains a number worth sitting with. Guyana’s non-oil economy is projected to grow at a remarkable average of 9.4 percent a year through 2027. But look inside that number and the composition tells its own story. Construction is growing at 25.4 percent. Manufacturing at 12.9 percent. Agriculture at 7.6 percent.

The non-oil boom, in other words, is being carried disproportionately by construction, and that matters because construction is what economists call derived demand. It responds to spending that originates elsewhere. When the State builds roads and the oil sector builds facilities, construction booms. When that spending slows, construction slows with it, because construction does not generate its own demand.

It is the echo of other money, not a source of it.

This is the distinction I want to draw as clearly as I can. Building the country physically and building the country productively are not the same thing.

A road is valuable if it connects farmers to markets, children to schools, and businesses to customers. The same road is just expensive concrete if nothing productive grows along it. If a new highway reduces transportation costs for farmers and helps them move produce to market faster and cheaper, that is development. If it simply gets us from one point to another a few minutes faster without creating new economic activity, its contribution is far smaller.

A hotel is an asset if visitors keep coming for decades and if it creates opportunities for local suppliers, local food producers, and local workers. Buildings can appreciate in value over time, but sustainable economic growth comes from the income and productivity they enable. The question to ask of every project is not how impressive it looks on opening day but what income it keeps generating in year ten, after the contractors have been paid and gone.

Construction employment itself illustrates the point. Construction jobs are important and provide incomes for thousands of families. But they are also inherently temporary. The mason who builds a hotel cannot rebuild the same hotel every year. The carpenter who works on a bridge eventually finishes the bridge. Sustainable prosperity requires industries that continue generating income and employment long after the final coat of paint has dried.

History offers a caution here, told gently. Resource booms everywhere produce construction booms because building is the fastest and most visible way to convert revenue into activity. The economies that prospered afterward were the ones where the building was in service of a productive plan. Ports that fed export industries. Power systems that lowered costs for every firm. Schools and laboratories that raised the capability of the people.

The economies that struggled were the ones where the construction was the plan, where the activity ended when the building did, and where the skills, firms, and industries that should have grown up alongside the concrete never quite did.

So what would it look like for our construction boom to serve a development plan rather than substitute for one?

It would mean judging public investment by the income it enables, not the square footage it delivers. It would mean pairing every physical investment with the human one, the road with the agricultural extension service, the industrial site with the technical training, the school building with the teacher development that fills it with learning.

It would mean deliberately growing Guyanese construction firms into engineering, design, and project management companies capable of competing regionally, so that the boom builds an industry and not just buildings.

And it would mean asking, sector by sector, what productive activity each project unlocks, and being honest when the answer is unclear. If an industrial park remains largely empty, it is not an engine of development. If a new port does not increase exports, it is not fulfilling its potential. If a hotel imports most of its supplies and creates few linkages with local businesses, its economic impact is smaller than its impressive façade suggests.

Most importantly, it would mean investing as heavily in people as we do in concrete.

The most productive infrastructure in any country is not concrete. It is human capability. A nation of highly skilled, healthy, and educated people can create wealth long after the oil runs dry. The government’s GOAL programme has rightly celebrated the award of more than 50,000 scholarships, and free education at the University of Guyana is helping to build a more educated society. Yet, at the same time, every five years our secondary schools lose a comparable number of students who leave the system without matriculating. This is a national contradiction that must be urgently addressed. Roads and bridges matter enormously, but ultimately, they are only platforms upon which productive people build businesses, innovate, and create prosperity.

None of this is an argument to build less. It is an argument to build with a clear development strategy in mind.

The cranes on our skyline are an opportunity that previous generations would have given anything to have. The task is to make sure that when they come down, they leave behind more than what they lifted. They should leave behind an economy that no longer needs the scaffolding.

Because a crane can build a skyline, but only productive people and productive industries can build a prosperous nation. If we mistake construction for development, we may one day find ourselves surrounded by impressive buildings but still searching for an economy.

---

• Construction, Development Plan

---