Business

In October 2023, the World Bank published the updated World Food Security Outlook (WFSO) report designed to monitor and analyze global food security, offering insights into severe food insecurity worldwide.

If the government can, within limits, be indulged in its up tempo reportage on the country’s first trillion dollar budget allocation, it needs to be reminded that, unlike in previous years, failure to effectively deliver (partially or entirely) on promises to which monies were allocated utilizing arguments about limited funding have now become far less credible given the enormous increase in the overall budgetary allocation this year.

With the prices of fruit and vegetables still cutting a swathe through ‘tight’ budgets at Municipal Markets in large swathes of coastal Guyana, the considerable numbers of shoppers who put in their appearances at last Sunday’s Farmers’ Market, at the Police Sports Club Ground, Eve Leary must have been pleased with what could be a reduction to their ‘budgetary tensions’.

Executive Director of the Barbados-based regional trade and investment promotion agency, Caribbean Export, Deodat Maraj is due to visit Guyana from Monday January 29 to Tuesday February 1, according to information sent to the Stabroek Business earlier this week from the entity’s headquarters.

CARICOM member country Trinidad and Tobago’s acquisition of a licence “to procure and produce natural gas from Venezuela’s Dragon Field has been s one of the high points of the country’s energy sector”, according to the country’s Energy Minister Stuart Young.

The region is at a juncture where CARICOM requires the chairmanship of a country which, in more ways than one, possesses the credentials to provide the quality of leadership which the region now urgently requires.

Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean can find themselves much better off in terms of increased investment, enhanced productivity and GDP growth if they can find effective ways of significantly reducing crime, according to the findings of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) study published in December last year.

By Brooke Glasford As a curly haired girl, you’d tend to use any opportunity to create a short cut when faced with the daily task of doing your hair.

The Trinidad and Tobago Logistics company, RAMPS Logistics, which is currently delivering services to oil companies operating in Guyana has disclosed its involvement in a high-profile investment with US and regional partners that is expected to yield an intra-regional ferry service as a ‘big opportunity” for the company.

With small businesses in various sectors of the country’s economy having become an increasingly ‘attractive’ option in the face of both high unemployment and evidence of growing entrepreneurial dispositions among younger Guyanese and in low-income households, the country’s recently unveiled 2024 budget presentation has articulated what government envisages as an intended response these issues.

Even as a handful of countries around the world, Guyana included, anticipate varying degrees of ‘development upturn’ in the period ahead, expert probing by the World Bank is sending signals that there are likely to be widely varying development experiences among countries in the period ahead as the global economy braces itself to experience what a World Bank expert suggest could be a global economy on the brink of its weakest half-decade performance in three decades, according to the most recent presentation of the Bank’s “Global Economic Prospects” report.

The World Bank is backing Jamaica’s economy to expand in 2024, for the fourth consecutive year, notwithstanding the somewhat gloomier projections for the remainder of the member countries of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) with the exception of oil-rich Guyana.

A great deal of the state-orchestrated hype that followed the promulgation of the country’s maiden trillion-dollar budget had to do with the kind of messaging that the government wished to disseminate at the start of 2023.

GASCI (www.gasci.com/telephone Nº 223-6175/6) reports that session 1055’s trading results showed consideration of $77,305,803 from 151,771 shares traded in 37 transactions as compared to session 1054’s trading results, which showed consideration of $33,234,347 from 112,233 shares traded in 45 transactions.

With local Agro Processors having reportedly created 130 new agro processed products last year, comments elicited by the Stabroek Business from Agro Processors in Regions Four, Five, Six and Ten suggest that the sector is looking to the Ministry of Agriculture to allocate a generous portion of its multi-billion dollar 2024 budget allocation to facilitate continued growth in the sector.

Evidence that increasing numbers of unemployed and underemployed Guyanese are seeking out either full time or part time income generating options in the micro and small business sectors would appear to have largely influenced the decision by government to allocate almost G$800 million to a “Small Business Fund” and the operations of the Small Business Bureau, respectively, in the 2024 Budget.

The Bank of Nova Scotia in Jamaica has extended its opening hours to accommodate customers inconvenienced by challenges at its Automated Banking Machines (ADM’s) BMs.

GASCI (www.gasci.com/telephone Nº 223-6175/6) reports that session 1054’s trading results showed consideration of $33,234,347 from 112,233 shares traded in 45 transactions as compared to session 1053’s trading results, which showed consideration of $15,355,747 from 46,362 shares traded in 29 transactions.