Introduction
Starting today, I shall attempt to offer readers as careful an assessment as I can of the developmental rationale that lies behind the Buxton Proposal, as I formulate it. In a previous public comment on it, I had advanced the proposition that the development literature at the beginning of the third decade of 21st Century clearly demonstrates: “cash transfers have been, and continue to remain, the single most successful poverty intervention policy tool, across the world”.
Despite this claim, I face a rather difficult uphill task in making the case for Guyana. Readers may ask, why is this so? Bluntly put, the prevailing environment that has been created in sections of the media, reveals an unrelenting slew of misinformation directed at the very Regions of the world, where cash transfers have met with significant measured success. Those Regions are Africa and the Latin America Caribbean area (LAC).
I have had occasion in previous columns to call to readers’ attention, the misinformation, fake news, and insulting diatribe consistently hurled against Africa, even though I have drawn to your attention the fact that of the ten fastest growing economies worldwide in the 2010s and going forward to the mid-2020s, as many as five of these are African economies! Cash transfers have proven to be quite successful in Africa, alongside the LAC region. Studies of these cash-transfer schemes have been conducted by most of the world’s leading development agencies and development policy think-tanks!