Last week, the Finance Minister presented this year’s budget which will be debated on Wednesday. The official chosen theme was more political than economic: “Steadfast Against All Challenges, Resolute in Building Our One Guyana”. This newspaper believes that “A people-centered Budget for economic takeoff” is more apt. From the time of independence there have been any number of theories of economic growth, but the hard lesson learnt since then is that while economic growth is necessary for development, the latter’s focus on the wellbeing of people cannot be neglected.
Guyana is a small state trying to navigate its way through a world-system that has become tremendously integrated through the intensification of globalization that ironically began with Europe’s “discovery” of our “new world”. It is clear that the PPPC government has shaken off the last vestiges of the moribund ideologies that kept our early leaders in thrall and our country in poverty. Not only Marxism has shown itself incapable of dealing with this new world, but also Neo-Liberalism that was supposed to usher in the ”end of history”. None of the economists from either school could predict the economic collapse of 2008.
As such, pragmatism rules the day and this is exactly what the 2022 Budget is: pragmatic. If there was any need to justify this approach, we witnessed the capitalist US government intervening with equity to save the post-financial and manufacturing sectors while the communist Chinese government is funding capitalist corporations on a scale unheard of in history. As the latter’s late leader Deng Xiaoping observed wryly in the 1960s – “Black cat or white cat, if it can catch mice, it’s a good cat.”
As such, while was customary to accept the workings of the market to make allocative decisions for the economy, the increasing telescoped development of Japan, followed by the Far Eastern Tigers and then China through governmental interventions has now made that approach the norm. As such, even in the absence of formal 5-year plans of the old Marxist economies, modern economies seeking to take off are guided by governmental strategic decisions. What are the strategic interventions signaled by the 2022 Budget? We do not have to look farther than the PPPC’s elections’ Manifesto.
First and foremost is the focus on infrastructure, primarily roads and bridges understandably so for a country as large and sparsely settled as we are. These are critical for any country seeking to develop in consonance with the philosophy of “teach a man to fish, rather than giving him a fish”. In the Budget, there is the funding of the highway from Linden to Mabaruma, the rehabilitation of the Corentyne Highway leading to the about-to-be launched Corentyne Bridge to Suriname, and the Demerara Harbour Bridge etc. For agriculture, there are several farm-to-market roads and one road network in the intermediate savannahs to facilitate production of soya and corn for stockfeeds.
The grandaddy of all projects is the facilitation of the gas-to-shore project with its integrated power generation and industrial estate for heavy industries to produce LPG and its downstream products like urea. This will provide the power and demonstrator effect to broaden our traditional agriculture economic base. Combined with facilitating the Local Content Act and other industries, technical and vocational schools have been augmented within a $74B education budget – in addition to the 20,000 scholarships that are already in the pipeline. Also catered for is the 650MW AFHEP that the PNC coalition had killed but industrialization demands. No country can develop without security and the $48B for this sector provides the funds for the root and branch needed changes that are painfully obvious to all and sundry.
But while the budget will teach all Guyanese to fish and live their lives in dignity without depending on handouts, until they begin catching fish, the government has also catered for more money to immediately end up in the pockets of citizens. $73B for the healthcare sector with see only an increase in Public Hospitals where care and medicines are free, but also upgrading the entire system. (To be continued)
