Introduction
To round off my evaluation of Guyana’s emergent oil and gas sector in its very first year, I shall report in coming columns on the Inter-American Development Bank’s (IDB) Technical Note, IDB-TN-1994, published August, 2020 and entitled, ‘Traversing a Slippery Slope: Guyana’s Oil Opportunity.’ The Note’s Abstract states that it has four areas of focus: 1) the country context; 2) the petroleum sector’s fiscal mechanism and projected revenues; 3) hurdles to constructing an effective governance regime for the sector; and 4) “new” policy perspectives on oil revenues utilization for sustainable development.
I encourage all readers to peruse this well constructed Note closely for themselves. My focus here is principally on item 2 listed above, as this is the area of my Sunday columns immediate concern for assessing the impact of the 2020 general crisis on Guyana’s emergent petroleum sector. Today I report on the fiscal mechanism; and, in the coming columns, I report on the Note’s modeling of prospective Government Take (revenues).