Business

GASCI (www.gasci.com/telephone Nº 223-6175/6) reports that session 897’s trading results showed consideration of $92,136,819 from 1,134,994 shares traded in 41 transactions as compared to session 896’s trading results which showed consideration of $194,765,851 from 2,238,868 shares traded in 19 transactions.

This newspaper well remembers the May 2019 passage in the National Assembly of those key amendments to the 2003 Procurement Act which (we had thought) paved the way for suitably equipped small businesses to have access to 20% of state contracts.

The available evidence continues to make a pretty strong case for asserting that the extent to which the major Business Support Organizations (BSO’s) consider themselves to be responsible for overseeing in a meaningful way the steady growth and development of micro and small businesses is strictly limited.

Realistic hope for meaningful improvement in the global economy this year will hinge on the extent to which efforts to roll back and even halt the further spread on the coronavirus gain meaningful momentum, the World Bank says in its January 2021 Global Economic Prospects Report published earlier this week.

Like hundreds of other Guyanese who have been operating modest business enterprises during 2020, Vasil Wood believes that the experience of having to do business in the destabilising environment of COVID-19 may well have taken him to a critical fork in his entrepreneurial road.

A limited survey amongst shoppers in the Bourda and East La Penitence municipal markets just prior to Christmas found consumer dispositions to the pumpkin fruit ranging from an I-can-take-it-or-leave-it posture to revelations that pumpkin is a routine part of their diets.

Like so many facets of life in so many places around the world, the agriculture and manufacturing sectors in Jamaica have the COVID-19 pandemic to thank for cutting short and, in fact, overturning the promising growth spurt with which they started 2020.The

Just how indifferent Caribbean Community (CARICOM) governments have been, over a protracted period in aggressively attending to issues that have a critical bearing on the food security issues which most of them have been facing for several years is reflected in the fact that a decade after the regional movement appeared to paying a high level of what turned out to be little more than lip service to crop insurance in its agricultural sector, one of their number appears to placing the issue on its domestic agricultural agenda again.

The International Data Corporation (IDC), one of the world’s leading global providers of market intelligence, advisory services, and events linked to the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets, is projecting that the year ahead will continue to be shaped by “the disruptive forces of COVID-19,” which it says has already changed “everything across all verticals now and into the future.”

                                             Kitco Market Data Gold Prices for the three day period ending Thursday January 07, 2021

GASCI (www.gasci.com/telephone Nº 223-6175/6) reports that session 896’s trading results showed consideration of $194,765,851 from 2,238,868 shares traded in 19 transactions as compared to session 895’s trading results which showed consideration of $300,790,924 from 3,662,850 shares traded in 17 transactions.

Since the World Bank has as many tools as any other organization with which to fashion projections regarding the likely behaviour of the global economy, going forward, it is altogether reasonable to assume that some measure of seriousness will be attached to its projections and predictions in the period immediately ahead.

Still to emerge from a testing tunnel of tough times, including sustained underfunding and more recently, a drastic decline in business growth arising out of the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, the country’s small and micro businesses are likely to have to dig even deeper in the period ahead in 2021, based on the early signals sent during a recent interview with Chief Executive Officer of the Small Business Bureau (SBB) Dr.

It appears that the ‘rash’ of so-called pyramid schemes proffering unsustainable ‘business models’ where a handful of ‘first in’ participants feed off those who enter lower down the chain and which appears to have been taking root in Guyana have attracted the attention of other countries in the region, triggering reports in sections of the regional media.

The likely extent of the recovery in the Caribbean and Latin American economies next year will be insufficient for the region to reach the economic activity levels seen in 2019, prior to the coronavirus pandemic, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) says in its ‘preliminary overview’ of economies of the region’ for 2020.

Local interest in ginger may not be exactly marginal though the extent of its cultivation and use locally pales into insignificance when compared with other countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa, not least, China and India, the world’s two leading ginger exporters, and Nigeria, reportedly Africa’s biggest consumer.