Letters · Authors’ Reply · Human Capital in the Oil Era
The authors of the 64/80 paradox answer Rory Fraser, Errol Benn and the readers who pressed them on why the failures they measured outlast governments — and argue that an independent audit body is a political device, not a technocratic one.
By Ramesh Gampat & Minakshi Mahabir · September 2026
A reply to Rory Fraser’s letter and to readers’ public commentary on “The Human Capital Paradox in Guyana: Investing More, Returning Less” (GBJ, 15 September 2026).
FOREWORD. This is the third piece in an exchange that began on 15 September with Ramesh Gampat and Minakshi Mahabir’s analysis of the 64/80 paradox and continued with Rory Fraser’s letter of concurrence. Here the authors reply — to Dr Fraser, and to readers who engaged with the article in public commentary on social media. The sharpest challenge put to them, by Dr Fraser and by Errol Benn alike, concerns not what they found but why it persists: whether efficiency, inequality and governance are three problems or, in Mr Benn’s phrase as the authors report it, one political problem in three guises. The authors accept the force of that challenge, and their answer is the most consequential passage below. The independent audit body they propose, they argue, is meant to change what politics rewards rather than to stand above politics. They close by putting a question back to Dr Fraser, and we would be glad to carry his answer.
Readers should know one thing the authors record in their opening paragraph: the Journal’s publisher, Dr Terrence Blackman, provided the back-cover endorsement for their book. That endorsement preceded this exchange. It does not alter the undertaking we gave when we published the article — that we welcome response, including dissent, and will publish it. The exchange so far has been conducted largely among people who accept the central finding. We would particularly welcome a reply from those who do not, including from those responsible for the health and education budgets under discussion. Readers’ comments are quoted as the authors have rendered them. The letter has been edited lightly for house style, with subheadings added. — The Editors
Debts and acknowledgements
We are grateful for the opportunity to respond to the commentary our article has generated, and we begin by discharging a debt that predates the article itself. Dr Collin Constantine, economist and author, honoured us by writing the foreword to Guyana’s Human Capital Paradox: Investing More, Returning Less. His foreword does not merely introduce the book; it situates it within the longer intellectual tradition of Caribbean development thought and challenges the reader to take the evidence seriously from the very first page. We are profoundly grateful for that gift. Dr Terrence Blackman, mathematician and educator, provided the book’s back-cover endorsement. His willingness to lend his name and his judgment to the project gave us confidence that the argument would find a serious readership, and the reaction to the GBJ article suggests that confidence was not misplaced. To both gentlemen: we hope to repay the honour not merely by thanking them in print, but by making the argument worthy of their confidence.
We also wish to thank, by name, the readers who took the time to engage with our article on Facebook and related platforms (it is very likely that we missed some comments). Kojo Parris described the piece as an ‘empirically rich essay’ that students of Guyana’s trajectory ‘must read and reread’ — a characterisation that humbles us and that we hope future readers will put to the test. Errol Benn offered the most extended and searching public commentary we have received; we engage with it at length below. Bryan Benn read the article three times and produced a generous and perceptive summary that has itself been widely shared; he also extended a separate word of thanks to the Guyana Business Journal and to Dr Terrence Blackman for publishing and amplifying the piece, and we are glad the record reflects that. Mbali Ann raised important and practical questions about incentivising teachers and doctors, and about the need to break down performance data by region and by population served — questions that go to the operational heart of what our proposed national stocktaking is designed to answer. Lenox Bobb observed that the PPP’s shift from a socialist to a free-market orientation changes where the policy emphasis falls, a point about ideology and political economy that connects, as we note below, to the more structural arguments advanced by others. Stephen Ra called for more empiricism and less rhetoric in Guyana’s national conversation. We share that conviction entirely, and it is the animating impulse behind the book.
Before turning to the substance of the responses, we want to remark on something that the responses themselves demonstrate. The quality of engagement — from Dr Fraser’s carefully argued letter to Mr Errol Benn’s probing commentary to Ms Ann’s practical instincts about regional data — suggests that there is a genuine constituency in Guyana for evidence-based public argument. That is not a small thing. One of the obstacles to human capital reform that our book identifies, though it is harder to quantify than a Gini coefficient, is the weakness of the public demand for accountability. When the costs of underperformance are diffuse and the benefits of the status quo are concentrated, the political pressure for change is structurally weak. A public conversation of this quality does not dissolve that structural problem, but it narrows the space available to those who prefer not to answer it. We are grateful to the Guyana Business Journal for creating that space.
Two methods, one finding
We turn now to Rory Fraser’s letter, which we read with admiration and genuine surprise. Dr Fraser has spent several years examining Guyana’s development trajectory through the lens of land tenure, forestry enforcement, sovereign-wealth governance, and public-service capacity. We approached the same trajectory through five World Bank investment indicators, the Human Development Index, and the Human Capital Index, benchmarked against eighteen comparator countries. As Dr Fraser puts it, we did not compare notes: we used different sources, different disciplines, and different methods. The convergence Dr Fraser identifies — thin public-sector capacity, geographic inequality between the coast and the interior, and corruption risk in resource allocation as the structural roots of underperformance — is precisely the convergence that gives us most confidence in our own findings. When two independent inquiries land in the same place, the probability that either has simply constructed a compelling story around a prior belief diminishes sharply. We are grateful to Dr Fraser for making that convergence public and explicit.
We also want to engage with the candid methodological observation at the heart of Dr Fraser’s letter. He writes that his institutional case histories cannot support the kind of cross-country claim our dataset enables — for instance, that Sri Lanka achieves a 90 per cent adult survival rate against Guyana’s 77 per cent at a lower level of investment and income. He says so without reservation, and we appreciate the intellectual honesty. The complement, however, also holds: the cross-country quantitative method that lets us establish the 64/80 ratio with precision cannot explain, on its own, why the pattern is so durable, or how the specific institutional pathologies of any one country combine to produce it. Dr Fraser’s case-study approach can do what our regressions cannot. The most important implication of his letter, we believe, is the methodological one: the two approaches are complements, not substitutes, and the question of what to do about Guyana’s human capital deficit will be answered better by their combination than by either alone. We note, too, Dr Fraser’s observation that both studies independently concluded that the University of Guyana requires sustained, long-term investment to become a genuine national learning institution. As he says, neither of us knew the other would arrive there. That convergence, from such different starting points, suggests the conclusion is not an artefact of method. It is what the evidence demands.
Why the paradox persists
The most substantive intellectual challenge in both Dr Fraser’s letter and Mr Errol Benn’s commentary concerns not what we found but why it persists. Mr Benn puts it with memorable concision: the three mechanisms we identify — efficiency deficits, inequality, and governance failures — are ‘one problem wearing three masks,’ and that problem is political, not administrative. Dr Fraser advances the same argument with greater specificity: the failures endure across changes in government because of a political economy of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, because announcement is politically rewarded while enforcement is not, and because ethnic-coded political competition converts ordinary administrative discretion into a question of group security. Mr Benn worries that our five recommendations risk being read as a ‘technocratic wish list’ unless the political incentives that sustain the paradox are addressed directly.
We accept the force of this argument, and we want to be clear that it does not undermine our analysis — it completes it. The book’s Chapter 11 engages the political economy of reform, though not at the depth either Dr Fraser or Mr Benn rightly argues the question deserves. We would offer two observations in response. First, the durability of these failures across governments of different ideological and ethnic character — the efficiency deficit and the governance deficit long predate any single administration, as Lenox Bobb’s observation about the PPP’s ideological evolution implicitly confirms — is precisely what makes a depoliticised institutional response so important. The independent audit body we propose is not a technocratic device designed to operate above politics; it is a political device designed to change the incentive structure by making the costs of non-delivery visible, measurable, and attributable. That is how the concentrated benefits and diffuse costs problem is most commonly addressed in successful reform contexts: not by eliminating politics, but by restructuring what politics rewards. Second, and here we would genuinely welcome Dr Fraser’s further engagement: what is new in Guyana’s situation is not the political economy — it has always been present — but the stakes. Guyana now has oil revenues large enough to waste on a historic scale. The cost of sustaining the old equilibrium — announce, celebrate, defer — has never been higher, and the demographic window within which the damage can be repaired has never been more finite. Whether the changed stakes will create political space for reforms that have so far been deferred will depend, in part, on the quality of the public conversation that follows publications such as this one.
The independent audit body we propose is not a technocratic device designed to operate above politics; it is a political device designed to change the incentive structure.
Regions, teachers and health workers
Ms Mbali Ann’s instinct to break down performance data by region and by population served is, we believe, the most practically actionable idea to emerge from the public discussion of this article. The book documents that the share of health and education budgets allocated to Guyana’s ten administrative regions has declined even as overall budgets expanded — a finding with serious implications for the rural and hinterland communities that bear the greatest burden of the human capital deficit. The national stocktaking we propose is specifically designed to generate exactly the regional disaggregation Ms Ann calls for. Without that granularity, any reform programme risks improving average national outcomes while leaving the most underserved communities further behind, which would worsen the inequality dimension of the paradox even as it appeared to address the overall deficit. Her point about incentivising the existing stock of teachers and health workers is equally important: the efficiency deficit we identify is not only a story about what is spent, but about how the people who deliver services are selected, trained, remunerated, supervised, and held accountable. A teacher who is paid too little, managed too loosely, and evaluated too rarely is a symptom of the same governance failure as a procurement officer who faces no consequences for diverting funds. They are different symptoms of the same institutional disease.
What happens next
We are struck by the quality and seriousness of this conversation. Errol Benn expressed the hope that our article would be ‘the beginning of a reckoning, not the end of one.’ We share that hope. Rory Fraser’s letter shows that the reckoning is already broader, more rigorous, and more methodologically diverse than any single study could have made it. The Guyana Business Journal has done the country a genuine service by providing the space. We are grateful to the Editor, to Dr Fraser, to each reader who commented, and to all those who shared the article with audiences we could not have reached alone. The 64/80 paradox is arithmetic; what happens next is politics. We hope this exchange has made the arithmetic harder to ignore.
Ramesh Gampat and Minakshi Mahabir
Co-authors, Guyana’s Human Capital Paradox: Investing More, Returning Less (Xlibris, 2026)
19 September 2026
Dr Ramesh Gampat is a development economist and formerly Deputy Director of the Human Development Report Unit, UNDP Regional Centre, Colombo. He is the author of several books on Guyanese economics and society, including Guyana’s Great Economic Downswing, 1977–1990 (2020), Essays: Guyana: Economics, Politics and Demography (2022), and The Guyanese FX Market: Modern Discourses and Controversies (2024).
Minakshi Mahabir is a graduate researcher at Toronto Metropolitan University, where she is completing a Master of Science in Global Management. She holds a BA (Hons) in International Economics and Finance, and her research interests span international trade, sourcing diversification, and supply-chain resilience.
The Guyana Business Journal welcomes letters in response to work it publishes. Letters may be edited for length and house style. The views expressed are the authors’ own.
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