Business Review

President Trump and his ultra-rich government have crudely appropriated some old ideas from progressive development economists.

The previous column showed that both the Bank of Guyana and the commercial banks need foreign currency assets.

The main monetary policy target of the country’s central bank, Bank of Guyana, is the exchange rate.

Economists think of technology as knowledge of the production process of a firm or industry.

Next week I am presenting a paper at the first entrepreneurship conference to be hosted by the School of Entrepreneurship and Business Innovation, University of Guyana.

Initially it was announced that Guyana will borrow US$900 million credit from the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB).

Part 7 We explored the idea of the resource curse in six previous columns before analysing the cost aspects of the oil and gas contract.

By now many Guyanese would have heard about the 14.25% effective royalty, which combines the 2% actual royalty enshrined in the contract, the 50-50% profit share and the 75% cost-recovery cap.

The previous column critically analysed the cost components of the production sharing agreement with ExxonMobil.

The previous six columns asked the question whether Guyana could escape the natural resource curse.

Part 6 The previous column explored how the lack of economic research capacity might have contributed to the lopsided contract in favour of ExxonMobil.

Making predictions in a complex and non-linear world often involves identifying initial conditions and then sequentially reasoning (or solving) forward.

In the previous column we explored the possibility of Guyana becoming a petro state overnight.

The second part in this series addressed the question of how much money Guyana will likely receive.

Part 2 The role of corporate governance The previous essay established the developmental context under which we address the essential question of this series: could Guyana escape the natural resource curse?

By now many Guyanese are pondering the important concept known as the natural resource curse.

My intention was to write this week about whether Guyana can evade the resource curse, which is often associated with oil and natural resource extraction.

 We noted last week that the Consolidated Fund (CF), which has been a standard part of the budget estimates, was not reported for the 2018 budget.

We noted last week that the budget provides a glimpse that the government is starting to think about a coherent development strategy.