Viewed against the backdrop of the customarily measured language employed in the compilation of reports of this nature, the aforementioned assertion could hardly have been blunter. Translated, the statement suggests that the figures tendered by the Finance Minister have no real basis in the actual performance of the country. They are, the report implied, contrived. And those are not the only figures that the report challenged. Similar queries were raised about rice production figures for last year. It is more than a little surprising that up until now there has been – as far as we are aware – no publicly-known communication between the government and the authors of the report.
The private sector too may well take issue with assertions in the EIU Report including claims – which run counter to persistent PSC assertions to the contrary – that it is “not optimistic about economic progress” and that there exists, at the level of the private sector, “a rising frustration with government policy and the widespread perception that criticism of the authorities will result in the loss of fiscal and other concessions.”
In this regard the EIU Report cited a recent Ram and McRae Survey in which it said, “60% of the respondents (presumably the respondents were from the business sector) indicated that they had no confidence in the country’s prospects” but rather more confidence in the prospects of their own entrepreneurial pursuits since “none of them planned to either contract or close their operations.”
Overall, the EIU’s assessment of the Guyana economy makes for reading which, in part, is both baffling and depressing. It comes amidst what we are told is a close and critical collaborative initiative in which government and the private sector are the key stakeholders to evolve a National Competitive Strategy; a kind of mechanistic blueprint for creating and/or significantly enhancing the total institutional framework for beefing up the competitiveness of the Guyana economy.
What then are we to make of the assertions contained in the EIU Report? Certainly, the claim in the report that some of the critical statistics that provide a barometer of the performance of the economy have been ‘massaged’ is an assertion that the government simply cannot afford to let pass without some sort of query, protest or explanation. In the case of the private sector while there has been no shortage of evidence that it has been decidedly measured in its public comments on official policy issues, surely, the EIU’s claim that its prudence is a function of a mortal fear of an official backlash should it be more robust in the expression of its views, speaks unkindly of the political administration and dismissively of the frequent assertions of the independence of the business sector. Public comment on the claims made in the April 2010 EIU Report by both the government and the private sector is not only warranted, it is obligatory.
