The $1.66 Indictment: How the World’s Fastest-Growing Economy Abandoned Its Workers

An Editorial by 592 Guardian

There is a number that should embarrass every official in the Office of the President, every technocrat in the Ministry of Finance, and every parliamentarian who has stood at a podium boasting of Guyana’s miraculous economic ascent.

That number is $1.66.

That is Guyana’s minimum wage — in US dollars per hour — as reflected in a regional comparison chart published by the Caribbean Election Centre. It places Guyana second from the bottom among all CARICOM territories, above only Suriname and the broken state of Haiti, and far below small island economies like Grenada, Saint Lucia, and Belize, nations with no oil, no gas, and no trillion-dollar offshore reserves to their names.

Read that again. Belize — with mangoes and tourism — pays its workers more per hour than Guyana, the country that the International Monetary Fund has just confirmed recorded the highest real GDP growth rate in the world, averaging 47 percent per year since 2022.

The paradox is not subtle. It is grotesque.

The Numbers Don’t Lie — They Accuse. Guyana’s economic transformation is advancing strongly and broadening in scale. Rapidly expanding oil production, strong non-oil output, and large-scale public infrastructure investment supported the highest real GDP growth rate in the world, averaging 47 percent per year since 2022. Real oil GDP increased by nearly 58 percent in 2024, while real non-oil GDP expanded over 13 percent.

The country’s sovereign wealth vehicle, the Natural Resource Fund, is bursting. The NRF received GYD 536 billion — approximately $2.57 billion USD — in oil revenue in 2024 alone, and is projected to exceed $3.2 billion by end of 2025. Production capacity, driven by ExxonMobil’s Stabroek Block operations, is projected to reach approximately 1.3 million barrels per day by the end of 2027.

These are not the statistics of a struggling developing nation. These are the statistics of a petrostate in full ascent — a country that, from 2020 to 2023, grew its oil production by 425 percent, making it a key contributor to global crude oil supply growth, with GDP per capita rising from below the global average to well above it.

And yet, the worker who wakes before dawn to open a shop, drive a minibus, stock a shelf, or tend a field is guaranteed, by law, the equivalent of less than two American dollars for every hour of their labour.

The Service Economy Comparison: A Study in Shame
What makes Guyana’s position in the CARICOM wage table uniquely indefensible — as opposed to merely unfortunate — is the context of its neighbours.

The territories that outrank Guyana in minimum wage are predominantly service-dependent economies. They have no oil. They have no gold. They have no bauxite. They live and die by the fortunes of tourism, offshore financial services, and seasonal agriculture. Bermuda at $17.13 is a British Overseas Territory whose economy rests almost entirely on insurance and reinsurance. Barbados at $5.36 earns its foreign exchange from hotel rooms and rum. Even St Kitts and Nevis, a twin-island nation with a combined population smaller than Georgetown, mandates a minimum wage of $4.63 per hour.

These are economies that have squeezed every competitive advantage from sunshine, sand, and service. They have no resource windfall to draw from — and yet they have found the political will to pay their workers more than Guyana does.

There is no economic justification for this. There is only a political explanation.

Oil Wealth Has Not Trickled Down — It Has Been Withheld. The government has a rehearsed response to wage concerns. Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo has pointed, with some regularity, to infrastructure spending, cash grants, and aggregate public sector wage growth as evidence that oil revenues are reaching the people. The macro numbers, however, tell a different story at the level of the individual worker.

The government-authorised minimum wage for the private sector, which dates back to 2022, is GY$60,147 — a figure that sits below the GY$100,000 income tax threshold. Simultaneously, unofficial estimates suggest that at least 40 percent of public servants take home salaries of GY$140,000 and less after income tax and NIS deductions.

The cost of living has not been similarly frozen. Estimates put the monthly budget needed by a single mother and her kindergarten-age child at more than GY$140,000 — more than double what the law requires a private sector employer to pay. Cost of living in Georgetown significantly exceeds the minimum wage — estimates suggest a single adult needs at least GYD 148,824 per month for basic needs.

The Guyana Public Service Union has been unambiguous about the gap. The GPSU called for a minimum salary of GY$221,000, shortly after agreeing with the government to a 2024 minimum salary of GY$94,765 — not taxable, but with NIS deductions applied. The union settled. The workers absorbed the shortfall.

Meanwhile, 48 percent of the population continues to live on less than USD$5.50 a day, placing Guyana among the highest poverty rates in Latin America and the Caribbean — even as the IMF praises its macroeconomic performance in the same breath.

The Resource Curse in Real Time. Economists have long warned of the “resource curse” — the paradox by which nations rich in natural wealth fail to translate that wealth into broad-based prosperity. The mechanisms are well understood: revenues flow to central government and connected elites; the non-extractive private sector stagnates; wages lag because political will to legislate otherwise is absent; inequality deepens even as headline GDP soars.

While oil revenues boost the national economy, they often fail to directly benefit the average citizen. Large-scale infrastructure projects and government operations funded by these revenues disproportionately benefit elites and international contractors. As a result, ordinary Guyanese often see little immediate impact on their daily lives, fostering frustration and skepticism about the oil boom.

Guyana is not immune to this pattern. It is, in many respects, exhibiting it in textbook fashion.

Sustained prosperity requires saving for the future, strengthening transparency, controlling inflation, and diversifying beyond oil — so advises even the IMF. But before Guyana can diversify, before it can build a human capital base capable of sustaining a post-oil economy, it must first ensure that the people doing the work of nation-building can afford to eat.

What Must Change
The minimum wage is not merely an economic instrument. It is a moral statement about what a society believes its workers are worth. For a country extracting billions in petroleum revenue, a minimum wage of $1.66 per hour is not a reflection of economic limitation. It is a reflection of political priority.

The government must immediately:
Raise the national minimum wage to a rate that reflects both the cost of living in Guyana’s urban centres and the nation’s demonstrated fiscal capacity. A floor of GYD $150,000 per month for the private sector — still short of a genuine living wage — would at minimum acknowledge the reality that working Guyanese face daily.

Unify the public and private sector floors. The current two-tier system, in which private sector workers earn less protection than public servants, creates a structural underclass in the economy’s most dynamic sectors.

Index the minimum wage to inflation and oil revenue milestones, so that workers automatically share in the country’s resource wealth rather than waiting on the political calendar.

Strengthen enforcement. A minimum wage that exists on paper but is honoured inconsistently, particularly in the retail, domestic work, and agricultural sectors, is no minimum wage at all.

The Verdict
Guyana does not have the economy of a country that should rank second-last in its own region on worker compensation. It has the economy of a country that should be leading that table — or at minimum, setting a regional standard worthy of its extraordinary fortune.

The $1.66 figure is not a data point. It is a verdict on governance.

It is what happens when oil wealth is treated as the property of the state and its contractors rather than the inheritance of the people who live above it.

The world’s fastest-growing economy should not have the region’s second-lowest minimum wage. These two facts cannot coexist indefinitely without political consequence. The question is not whether Guyanese workers deserve better.

The question is how much longer they will be made to wait.