The state of the country’s economy and exactly where it has been heading over the past year or so is one of the current talking points among Guyanese. At the political level, the issue has slipped into a war of words between the APNU+AFC coalition government and the opposition People’s Progressive Party.
Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo has not only asserted that the advent of the incumbent administration has coincided with a decline in the country’s economy, but has also expressed the view that the government has no clear plan for putting it back on track.
While the private sector appears to share the view that the economy is indeed in a condition of decline, the Private Sector Commission (PSC) poured cold water on the political point Mr Jagdeo sought to make by stating that a waning in the economy had predated the accession of the present government to office, going back at least ten years.
Different ministers of government have weighed in on the subject of the state of the country’s economy from time to time in recent months. Just a few weeks ago, at a private sector forum, Business Minister Dominic Gaskin appeared to concede that there had indeed been a slowdown in the country’s economy, though he insisted that “it began before last year’s change in government.” Mr Gaskin went on to say that whatever the state of the economy the government has “a responsibility to provide the best possible conditions for the growth and development of our economy and by extension the businesses that operate in our economy.”
Much more has been said about the state of the economy by Finance Minister Winston Jordan. In May he asserted that the economy was in good shape, utilizing what he described as “the numbers” for his assertion, though what he did not say was whether those “numbers” included unemployment figures. The number he provided were last year’s three per cent growth and the projected four per cent growh this year. Mr Jordan, meanwhile, has acknowledged that the economy has experienced reduced spending, pointing to the success of government in strangling the drug trade as the primary reason for the decline in spending power.
In essence, however, Mr Jordan concluded that the situation did not amount to “a doomsday scenario” and that the government was doing “reasonably well” in managing the economy in a manner that seeks to halt any further slide.
Here, it is important to make a distinction between the concrete assertions made by the Finance Minister about the state of the economy and the assurances which he seeks to give about the government’s efforts to take action to halt any further slide.
The latter constitutes the sort of generalized undertakings which the government would obviously feel politically obliged to give. Observers will obviously mark those words and seek to determine, down the road, whether we are moving in the direction of delivering on the assurances provided, the bottom line being that there is need for a good deal more buoyancy in the economy.
One might be inclined to chide Mr Jordan for his recent comment on what he said was the “one-sided view” on the economy propagated by sections of the media, a perspective that bares a familiar form of political behaviour that seeks the place an unwholesome label on any objective media viewpoint as undesirable. That, however, is simply a passing aside, the substantive issue being the real condition of the economy and just when the various undertakings will be transformed into serious job creation and raising the standard of living.
If no one is expecting the proverbial building of Rome in a day Mr Jordan’s pronouncements regarding modest increases in salaries and pensions, VAT, electricity and gasoline price reductions and increases in income tax thresholds are developments readily acknowledged as modest building blocks towards the administration’s ‘good life’ undertaking.
What perhaps is missing at this time is any definitive understanding as to the state of the much vaunted public/private sector partnership in the building of the economy since, setting aside the customary clichéd pronouncements about a partnership no definitive moves have as yet been made by the government and the private sector to sit together to chart a way forward in furtherance of that maxim.
We still need, for example, to get a clear understanding from the private sector as to whether government’s policies sit well with its plans for business growth. From the government, there is a need to get a fix on the extent to which the country is attracting meaningful overseas investment and how those investments might potentially stack up against job-creation and income-generation. That is just the sort of information that would engender a significantly enhanced level of public optimism.