Guyana’s Great Growth Paradox: The Numbers Are Soaring. Are the People?

Guyana’s Great Growth Paradox: The Numbers Are Soaring. Are the People?

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Part I of “Guyana 2025: Growth, Gold, Oil—and the Questions Behind the Numbers”

Guyana is again being celebrated as one of the fastest-growing economies on earth. The Government points to an estimated 19.3 percent expansion in real GDP in 2025; the IMF reports growth above 19 percent, following average annual growth near 40 percent over 2023 and 2024. Those are extraordinary numbers. They should not be denied, minimized, or spun away  

But neither should Guyanese be asked to confuse a statistical explosion with a national transformation.

The real question is not whether Guyana is growing. It plainly is. The real question is what is growing, who controls it, who benefits from it, and what will remain when the easy oil money has been spent.

The headline hides the story

The Government’s own 2026 Budget Speech reported total real GDP growth of 19.3 percent in 2025, oil-and-gas growth of 21 percent, and non-oil growth of 14.3 percent. It also reported production of 261.1 million barrels of crude during the year. The IMF similarly reported that oil output exceeded 900,000 barrels per day by the end of 2025—35 percent higher than one year earlier—and identified construction, agriculture, mining and manufacturing as the sources of non-oil expansion.

That is the official celebration: oil is booming, non-oil activity is rising, unemployment has declined, and Guyana is moving forward.

But growth percentages can be deceptive when one sector has become so overwhelmingly large that it dwarfs the rest of the economy. A small sector can grow quickly and still add comparatively little to national output. A giant sector can grow at a slower rate and still determine the national result.

That is the difference between a headline and an explanation.

 Oil remains the engine

By the Government’s own account, oil and gas remain the main driver of Guyana’s overall economic growth.  The IMF’s description of strong non-oil growth does not change that fundamental fact; it confirms that construction and other domestic activity are rising beside an oil sector whose output has expanded at an astonishing pace.

The public deserves an honest accounting of what this means.

When oil revenue enters the Treasury, is withdrawn from the Natural Resource Fund, and is spent on roads, bridges, buildings, housing, contractors, equipment, security, transport and public services, the resulting activity is recorded as construction, services or other non-oil output.

That activity is real. Workers are paid. Contractors earn. Materials are bought. Projects are announced. Concrete is poured.

But let us be clear: oil money spent through a non-oil sector does not automatically become economic diversification.

A construction surge financed by petroleum is still dependent on petroleum. A housing boom sustained by state contracts and oil-funded liquidity is still vulnerable to the spending decisions of the state. A retail sector expanding because contractors, officials and oil-service workers have more money to spend has not necessarily become an internationally competitive industry.

It may be activity. It may even be prosperity for some. But it is not yet proof of transformation.

The country of two economies

This is where the paradox begins.

Guyana can be one of the fastest-growing economies in the world while an ordinary family still counts every dollar at the market. It can export hundreds of millions of barrels of crude while nurses, teachers, pensioners, vendors, farmers and public servants wonder why rent, groceries, transport, school supplies, medicine and utilities remain so difficult to afford. It can be rich in GDP while too many citizens remain poor in purchasing power.

It can be praised abroad for growth while people at home ask a much simpler question: if the country is doing so well, why is life still so hard?

That question is not anti-development. It is the most pro-development question a country can ask.

A government that truly believes in shared prosperity should welcome it. It should answer it with facts: poverty data, household-income data, food-price data, wage data, rental data, regional spending data and clear evidence of who has gained from the oil era. Instead, Guyanese are too often presented with a national growth rate as though it settles every argument. It does not.

Growth is not distribution

GDP tells us how much output is produced. It does not tell us how income is divided. It does not tell us whether a mother can afford milk, whether a young man can find skilled work, whether a farmer can compete, whether a pensioner can buy medication, or whether a hinterland community has reliable health care, electricity, roads, water and internet.

It does not tell us whether prosperity has reached the people who were promised that oil would change their lives.

The IMF reported that unemployment declined to 6.2 percent at the end of 2025, even as it described the economy as constrained by limited implementation capacity and stressed the importance of saving a larger share of additional oil revenue in line with absorptive capacity.  That is not a minor footnote. It is the warning inside the celebration.

A country can spend faster than it can plan. It can build faster than it can maintain. It can borrow because lenders see oil wealth, import because contractors need equipment, and announce projects faster than institutions can supervise them.

Then the boom becomes a conveyor belt: money enters, contracts multiply, imports surge, costs rise, and the public is asked to applaud the speed of the machine without being allowed to inspect where it is taking the country.

The construction question

The IMF identifies construction as the principal driver of Guyana’s non-oil expansion.  That should prompt celebration only after it prompts scrutiny.

What is being built? Who receives the contracts? How many projects are completed on time and within budget? How much equipment is being imported? How much is being leased, shared and efficiently used? How much work is done by Guyanese labor? How much value stays in Guyana after foreign machinery, materials, consultants and suppliers are paid?

Most importantly: what will these projects produce ten years from now?

A country does not become developed merely because it has construction sites. Development is built when roads lower farm costs, schools produce capable graduates, hospitals save lives, energy reduces business expenses, ports increase exports, and public investments are maintained long after the ribbon-cutting ceremony is over.

Without that discipline, a construction boom can become little more than a temporary distribution system for oil rents.

The question Government cannot avoid

Guyana’s growth is real. Its oil production is real. Its new fiscal space is real. Its opportunity is real. So is the responsibility.

The Government must stop treating every request for a deeper accounting as hostility to progress. The public is not asking Guyana to reject oil. The public is asking whether oil is being used to build a country that can stand when oil prices fall, wells decline, contracts end, and the easy years are over.

That is the test.

♦ Not whether GDP reaches another record.

♦ Not whether another foreign institution applauds the numbers.

♦ Not whether another minister can announce another project.

The test is whether oil wealth is producing a broader productive economy; whether it is lowering the cost of living rather than inflating it; whether it is building competent institutions rather than merely bigger budgets; and whether the people who endured Guyana before oil are finally receiving more than speeches about what oil might one day bring.

Guyana may be growing faster than almost any country in the world. But growth is not the same thing as transformation.

And until the benefits are broad, visible, measurable and lasting, the world’s fastest-growing economy will remain one of its most troubling paradoxes.