The economy is healthy?
There has to be concern when one day a person attributes the slowdown in business sales to the drying up of illegal flows and then not long after pronounces that the economy is in good health. There has to be concern when it is being touted that in one year, the coalition was able to reverse the poor health of the economy. Those statements are bewildering.
There has to be graver concern when the government claims that the rate of growth had been declining, yet wants to boast that the economy is in good health because it is projected to grow by over 4% this year, about 1% over the ‘slowing’ rate of last year.
The APNU+AFC government has never denied that the longest stretch of economic growth took place under the PPPC government, ten straight years. APNU+AFC campaigned on the basis that despite this growth young people were not obtaining jobs and that the VAT was oppressive and posed a burden on workers and households.
APNU+AFC said that despite the growth, there were high levels of poverty and other social problems, throughout the country. APNU+AFC complained that workers were being underpaid.
In one year, those problems have not been fixed, and therefore the resort to bragging rights about higher rate of growth is really perturbing. After taking into consideration all that was said on the campaign trail, to now come forth and claim that we have a healthy economy after only one year in government is a little perplexing.
The government should not be seeking refuge in economic growth. The government knows that there is something called jobless growth. It should know that even with growth there can be serious problems in the economy. The government is opening itself to higher claims for wages for workers when it publicly says that the economy is healthy.
If the economy is healthy then the unions will ask for the workers to be paid the same 50% salary increase that was paid to Ministers of the government. If the economy is healthy, the unions will ask where are the jobs that are supposed to be created.
The basis of a healthy economy cannot be economic growth. The IMF still, even today, takes that approach and measures the health of an economy by reference to the increase in output. There is another approach, one that looks at other indices such as human development indicators.
APNU+AFC must distance itself from the approach taken by the PPP in trying to establish an economic track-record based on growth. Growth without jobs is not development. A country swarming with mosquitoes, even as government itself is indicating cases of Guillian-Barré syndrome which people in the medical profession associate with the Zika virus.
A major rice market was lost in Venezuela, lost, some would say, too easily. Rice prices have dipped and production may actually be lower this year than last year. Gold continues to do well, with declarations increasing by some 60% on the back of production from large gold mines, but the smaller miners are not in the best of health. They know that the gains they are receiving because of the reduction in the price of fuel can quickly evaporate. Any economy in which there is only one shining sector is an economy that could be heading eventually for the rocks.
The health of an economy is measured by jobs. What is the government doing about job-creation? The sugar estate at Wales is going to be closed at the end of this year and LBI is being merged with Enmore.
The health of the economy is about the cost of living. Inflation we are told is low, but wages are still being constrained. Low inflation and a slowdown in business activity and the rate of commercial credit, requires a better explanation than merely saying that the economy is healthy.
The government has a duty to state to the Guyanese people what was done over the past year on the economic side to reverse the problems that the government inherited. The government should state what it did, so that the people can decide for themselves whether the economy is indeed healthy or it is like the City, on which patchwork was done and which is now, according to media reports, facing a financial crisis
