Guyana’s most basic and fundamental economic statistics are its national accounts. However, most readers are probably not aware that, the very first effort at their construction was undertaken by Dr. Carleen O’Loughlin of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER), University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Jamaica way back in the 1950s before Independence. That study is entitled “The Economy of British Guiana, 1952-1956: A National Accounts Study”. It is available in the ISER Journal, Social and Economic Studies, Vol 8, Number 1, and is published as a Special Number, March 1, 1959. Her study was a truly heroic endeavour, as national accounts construction is painstaking. Usually it requires the resources of national statistical offices in order to execute them effectively, and not individual scholars.
Dr. O’Loughlin’s study is invaluable; but, as a first effort, gaps in the dataset remained. Nonetheless, it reached minimum acceptable international standards, for that time. Not surprisingly thereafter, the Guyana Bureau of Statistics (BoS) took over the formal responsibility for the annual construction and presentation of the national accounts.
Growth sclerosis
Some readers would recall that, during the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, there was a spate of highly publicized analytical studies on