Introduction
In today’s column I shall continue the effort to offer readers, as careful an assessment as I can of the “reasonings” (developmental rationale), underpinning the Buxton Proposal of “oil-for-cash” transfers to Guyanese households, as the final element of the Guyana’s Petroleum Road Map, as I have been describing it. As indicated in last week’s column, while the reasonings are presented serially, no order of priority has determined the sequence of their presentations. Rather that sequence is entirely a matter of analytical convenience.
The first reasoning, which was introduced last week, had stressed the fact that cash transfers constitute a master class of poverty policy interventions, which are designed to combat income poverty. More specifically, the point was made that, this policy intervention tool is not based on abstract theoretical constructs. Instead it is essentially the product of several evaluations of poverty intervention methods, which have been conducted by leading development agencies and think tanks, over the past several decades.