The Human Capital Paradox in Guyana: Investing More, Returning Less

The advantage of economic growth is not that wealth increases happiness, but that it increases the range of human choice

— W. Arthur Lewis, The Theory of Economic Growth (1955); Nobel Laureate in Economics, 1979

I. Introduction

There are nations that grew wealthy before they became developed, and nations that became developed before they grew wealthy. Guyana, in 2026, is emphatically the former — and the distance between its income and its human capital is the most consequential development challenge it faces. Since the export of crude oil began in December 2019, the country’s overall GDP has expanded at an average annual rate of nearly 33 per cent in real terms, compressing into seven years a transformation that most countries accomplish across several generations; by the close of 2026, overall GDP will be roughly 7.5 times its 2019 level.

Guyana’s per capita income in purchasing power parity terms reached US$46,959 in 2023 — among the highest in the Caribbean — while its HDI score of 0.776 places it in the ‘high human development’ category but below eight of its eighteen comparators. Its HCI score of 0.495 means that a child born in Guyana today will realise barely half her productive potential by the age of 18, compared with a comparator mean of 0.530. In the health and education dimensions of the HDI — the dimensions that most directly reflect human capital investment — Guyana lags behind fifteen and thirteen of its eighteen comparators, respectively.¹

This extraordinary income growth has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in public expenditure on human capital. Between 2014 and 2026, the central government’s health budget rose nearly eightfold, from G$20.85 billion (US$101 million) to G$161.11 billion (US$773 million). Education expenditure grew in parallel. Spending per capita on health and education combined rose by approximately 585 per cent over the same period. Guyana now out-invests 64 per cent of an eighteen-country comparator sample on the five internationally comparable human capital investment indicators drawn from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators database. Yet 80 per cent of those same countries achieve better human capital outcomes — higher scores on the United Nations’ Human Development Index, the World Bank’s Human Capital Index, or both. This is the 64/80 paradox: investing more, returning less. Understanding it, and reversing it, is the purpose of this article.²

The study on which this article is based (Gampat and Mahabir, 2026) summarises the comparative evidence through what the authors call the 64/80 ratio: Guyana’s human-capital investment rate exceeds that of 64 per cent of the eighteen comparators, but 80 per cent of those same countries obtain superior returns. This article presents the evidence for that finding, identifies the structural mechanisms that explain it, and advances a policy framework for reversing it.³

The article is organised as follows. Section II reviews the theoretical case for investing in human capital, drawing on the book’s Chapter 2. Section III situates Guyana’s oil economy and governance context. Section IV documents the investment record using the WDI data for all nineteen countries (Guyana plus eighteen comparators). Section V examines returns through the HDI; Section VI through the HCI. Section VII states and explains the 64/80 ratio. Section VIII identifies the structural mechanisms sustaining the paradox. Section IX sets out policy priorities. Section X concludes.

II. The Importance of Investing in Human Capital

The theoretical case for treating expenditure on education and health as investment rather than consumption was established by Schultz (1961) and Becker (1964). Both showed that such expenditure raises individuals’ productive capacity, earning potential, and quality of life in ways that are analytically parallel to investment in physical capital — but with the crucial additional feature that human capital is embodied in persons and cannot be separated from them.⁴

At the macroeconomic level, the endogenous growth theory of Romer (1990) and Lucas (1988) demonstrated that human capital can sustain long-run growth through the accumulation of knowledge and the positive externalities generated by a more educated and healthier workforce.⁵ Psacharopoulos and Patrinos (2018), in a decennial review of the global evidence, found that the private rate of return to an additional year of schooling averages 8.8 per cent globally, with higher returns in low- and middle-income countries. The social returns — which include the benefits that accrue to firms, communities, and the state — are higher still.⁶

The World Bank’s Human Capital Project (2018) operationalised these insights through the HCI, which measures the human capital that a child born today can expect to attain by age 18, given current patterns of health and education provision in her country. The Bank’s research estimates that raising the HCI of low- and middle-income countries to the level of the best performers would add 1.4 percentage points per annum to their long-run growth rates.⁷

For small, resource-rich economies such as Guyana’s, the centrality of human capital is especially acute. Resource revenues create fiscal space but do not automatically generate the human capabilities needed to diversify an economy, absorb technology, or govern complex institutions. The countries that have successfully converted natural resource wealth into broadly shared human development — Botswana, one of the study’s eighteen comparators, being perhaps the most instructive case — have done so precisely by channelling resource rents into human capital while simultaneously building the governance institutions needed to sustain that investment over time.

Chapter 2 of the book grounds this argument in a detailed review of the empirical literature, tracing the links from human capital to productivity, innovation, demographic transition, and institutional quality. It concludes that human capital investment is not merely an instrument of economic growth but a constitutive component of development — valuable in itself, and doubly valuable for a country whose constitution guarantees free health care and free education to every citizen as a matter of right.⁸

III. Guyana’s Economic Context

Guyana’s economy since 2019 is best understood as a dual economy: an oil sector that is essentially an export enclave, owned predominantly by foreign companies and generating revenues that flow primarily to the state; and a non-oil domestic economy that is the primary source of livelihoods for most Guyanese. In 2019, the oil sector produced 1.7 per cent of GDP; by 2026 it accounted for approximately 60 per cent. Over the same period, the non-oil economy grew at a more modest but still solid annual average of approximately 8.5 per cent.⁹

The distinction between the two economies matters critically for human capital policy. It is the non-oil economy — in agriculture, services, construction, and small enterprise — that employs the vast majority of Guyanese workers. The quality of human capital in that economy is therefore the primary determinant of whether oil wealth translates into broadly shared prosperity or remains concentrated in the oil enclave and the state apparatus that manages its revenues.

Governance presents a significant and well-documented challenge. Guyana’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) score was 40 out of 100 in 2025, placing it 84th among 182 countries — below Trinidad and Tobago (41) and above the Dominican Republic (37) among the Caribbean comparators in the study’s sample that Transparency International scores, and in the lower half of the global distribution for four consecutive years.¹⁰

The book does not advance a definitive explanation for sub-optimal human capital returns, but hypothesises that waste and corruption are significant contributing factors. As President Ali noted at the Guyana Energy Conference in February 2026: ‘If you look at where we are today and the type of investment we have made in terms of education, technology, I think we are Norway on steroids.’¹¹ The evidence assembled in this article suggests the aspiration is not yet matched by the human capital reality — and that the gap cannot be closed by spending more alone.

IV. The Investment Record: Guyana and Eighteen Comparator Countries

Chapter 5 of the book compares Guyana’s investment in human capital against eighteen countries selected from the World Bank’s high, upper-middle, and lower-middle human development groups, spanning Latin America and the Caribbean, South and South-East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Indian Ocean. The sample was constructed to include countries at diverse income levels and from diverse regions — including, crucially, countries that achieve better human capital outcomes than Guyana at lower investment rates. The five investment indicators are drawn from the World Bank’s WDI database for 2020, the most recent year for which comparable cross-country data are available.

Table 1 presents the full data for all nineteen countries (the eighteen comparators plus Guyana). The indicators are: per capita income (PCI, current PPP dollars); government expenditure on education as a share of GDP (GEE, % GDP); government expenditure on education as a share of total current government expenditure (GEE, % TCGE); domestic general government health expenditure as a share of GDP (DGGHE, % GDP); domestic general government health expenditure as a share of current government expenditure (DGGHE, % TCGE); and current health expenditure as a share of GDP (CHE, % GDP). The last three indicators are strictly WDI health indicators; the first two are WDI education indicators. Guyana’s row appears in capitals.

Several findings emerge from Table 1. Considering the five WDI investment indicators (GEE % GDP, GEE % TCGE, DGGHE % GDP, DGGHE % TCGE, CHE % GDP), Guyana out-invests the majority of comparator countries across most dimensions. On the education-to-GDP ratio (5.06 per cent), only four of the eighteen comparators — Botswana (8.06 per cent), Lesotho (7.00 per cent), Brazil (5.77 per cent), and St. Vincent and the Grenadines (5.46 per cent) — invest more. On the health-to-TCGE ratio (13.01 per cent), only four comparators — Nicaragua (18.13 per cent), Panama (20.34 per cent), Dominican Republic (14.68 per cent), and Ecuador (13.07 per cent) — invest a larger share.

Critically, Guyana’s investment rates are notably higher than those of countries that achieve far better human capital outcomes. Sri Lanka, with an education-to-GDP ratio of just 1.56 per cent and a health-to-GDP ratio of just 1.99 per cent, achieves an HCI score of 0.598 — more than 20 per cent above Guyana’s. Indonesia, with an education-to-GDP ratio of only 1.02 per cent, achieves an HCI of 0.540. These cross-country contrasts are the empirical foundation of the 64/80 paradox.

Guyana’s per capita income of US$16,819 (current PPP dollars, 2020) places it above twelve of the eighteen comparator countries. This is important because income is itself a resource for human capital accumulation — and yet higher income does not translate into better outcomes.¹²

V. Returns on Investment: Evidence from the Human Development Index

The HDI is computed annually by UNDP as the geometric mean of three normalised dimension indices: life expectancy at birth (health), expected and mean years of schooling (education), and GNI per capita (income). Guyana’s HDI score of 0.776 in 2023 places it in the ‘high human development’ category, at the lower boundary of that group.¹³

The composition of Guyana’s HDI score reveals the paradox with particular clarity. The income dimension index (0.929) is already near its effective ceiling: at a per capita GNI of US$46,959 (2021 PPP dollars), oil revenues have pushed this indicator close to saturation. Future HDI improvement must come almost entirely from the health index (0.772) and the education index (0.652). These are precisely the dimensions in which Guyana performs most poorly relative to its comparators.

In the health dimension, fifteen of the eighteen comparator countries have a higher health index than Guyana (0.772). In the education dimension, thirteen of eighteen have a higher education index (0.652). The education index of 0.652 is especially sobering: it is lower than those of Dominica (0.731), Ecuador (0.712), Seychelles (0.873), St. Kitts and Nevis (0.862), and St. Vincent and the Grenadines (0.828), including Dominica and Ecuador, whose per capita incomes are well below Guyana’s.¹⁴

A further signal of misaligned development is provided by the GNI per capita rank minus HDI rank differential. In 2023, Guyana’s income rank exceeded its HDI rank by 54 places — the largest differential in the study’s comparator sample and one of the largest in the world. This metric indicates that Guyana is richer, in income terms, than it is developed in human terms: a country whose income has raced ahead of its human capital.¹⁵

The Inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI) would reduce Guyana’s effective score further. While full IHDI data are not available for Guyana (UNDP reports only partial inequality data), the book’s calculations, based on available inequality measures for health (14.9 per cent loss) and education (10.4 per cent loss), and an income inequality assumption derived from Brazil’s Gini-equivalent, suggest Guyana’s IHDI would be approximately 0.560 — an overall HDI loss of roughly 28 per cent. This compares with an overall loss of 23.6 per cent for Barbados and 24.4 per cent for Brazil.¹⁶

The HDI also corrects poorly for an economy that is structurally dual in Guyana’s sense. When GNI per capita is recalculated using non-oil GDP rather than overall GDP — to capture the living standard of the economy in which most Guyanese actually work — per capita income falls from US$46,959 to US$20,291, a reduction of 56.8 per cent. On the non-oil HDI, Guyana’s income index drops from 0.929 to approximately 0.814, and the overall HDI falls from 0.776 to approximately 0.713 — well into the middle band of the high human development group and considerably closer to the regional median than the headline figure suggests.

VI. Returns on Investment: Evidence from the Human Capital Index

The World Bank’s HCI measures the human capital that a child born today can expect to accumulate by age 18, given current patterns of health and education provision. A score of 1.0 represents full attainment of productive potential. Guyana’s score of 0.495 in 2020 means that the expected productivity of a Guyanese worker, relative to a benchmark of complete education and full health, is barely half.¹⁷

Table 2 presents the combined investment and returns data for all nineteen countries from the study’s Table 9.3, enabling direct comparison of investment rates and outcomes. The returns indicators are: HDI and its dimension indices (2023); HCI score; learning-adjusted years of school (LAYS); harmonised test scores (HTS); and the adult survival rate (ASR, ages 15–60).

Table 2 is the core empirical exhibit of the paradox. Reading across Guyana’s row, the investment indicators (the last five columns of Table 1) place Guyana above the majority of comparators; yet the returns indicators in Table 2 place Guyana below the majority. The HCI of 0.495 is exceeded by fourteen of the eighteen comparators — including Nicaragua (0.508), Nepal (0.505), and Indonesia (0.540), all of which invest substantially less than Guyana in health and education.

The HCI component breakdown is particularly instructive. Guyana’s LAYS of 6.8 years is below the comparator mean of 7.51 years. Its HTS of 346 is among the lowest in the sample — nearly 13 per cent below the comparator mean of 396 — and third-lowest overall, above only Ghana (307) and the Dominican Republic (345). The HTS is the most direct measure of learning quality, making this finding especially significant: Guyana’s children are spending a roughly average number of years in school, but learning relatively little while there.¹⁸

Guyana’s adult survival rate of 77 per cent is among the lowest in the sample, equalling Ghana’s and exceeded by sixteen of the eighteen comparators. This poor showing on adult survival is a health system failure: at a per capita income of US$16,819 (2020 PPP dollars), Guyana has the resources to prevent many of the premature adult deaths that drag down this indicator.¹⁹

The Utilisation-Adjusted HCI (UHCI) — which discounts human capital stock by actual employment rates — deepens the concern further. Guyana’s basic UHCI is 0.26, compared with a LAC average of 0.35. Disaggregated by gender, the UHCI for girls (0.21) is lower than for boys (0.31): Guyanese girls systematically out-perform boys in educational attainment, but face structural barriers in converting that education into employment — a waste of human capital that compounds the efficiency deficit in education delivery.²⁰

VII. The 64/80 Ratio: Paradox Confirmed

The study’s central finding can be stated in a single ratio: 64/80. Guyana’s human-capital investment rate exceeds that of 64 per cent of the eighteen comparators, but 80 per cent of those same countries obtain superior returns. The five investment indicators used to derive the 64 per cent figure are GEE % GDP, GEE % TCGE, DGGHE % GDP, DGGHE % TCGE, and CHE % GDP. The returns indicators used to derive the 80 per cent figure are the HDI health index, the HDI education index, and the HCI score.²¹

The investment side of the ratio: on the education-GDP ratio, 77.8 per cent of comparators invest less than Guyana; on the education-TCGE ratio, 61.1 per cent invest less; on the health-GDP ratio, 61.1 per cent invest less; on the health-TCGE ratio, 77.8 per cent invest less; and on the current health expenditure ratio, 44.4 per cent invest less. Averaging across these five indicators, Guyana out-invests approximately 64 per cent of its comparators.

The returns side of the ratio: 44.4 per cent of comparators have a higher overall HDI; 83.3 per cent have a higher health index; 72.2 per cent have a higher education index; and 77.8 per cent have a higher HCI score. The figure of 80 per cent rounds up the 77.8 per cent average of the three returns indicators from which it is derived (the health index, the education index and the HCI), and it is robust — on no single returns indicator does Guyana out-perform a majority of its comparators.

The 64/80 ratio is thus not a rhetorical device but a quantitative summary of a consistent pattern across multiple databases and measurement frameworks. It is particularly striking because many of the countries that out-perform Guyana on human capital returns do so at lower income levels and lower investment rates. Ecuador (PCI: US$11,527; HCI: 0.594), Sri Lanka (PCI: US$12,941; HCI: 0.598), and Nicaragua (PCI: US$6,274; HCI: 0.508) all deliver substantially better human capital outcomes than Guyana at lower cost — a finding that cannot be explained by income effects alone and points directly to systemic efficiency failures in Guyana’s service delivery.

An additional dimension of the paradox is revealed when GNI per capita is restricted to the non-oil economy. At US$20,291 (2021 PPP dollars), the non-oil per capita income is considerably lower than the headline figure, and several comparators — including Dominica, Brazil, Malaysia, Panama, Seychelles, St. Kitts, and Trinidad — have higher non-oil per capita incomes when measured this way. On this adjusted basis, Guyana’s income advantage over the median comparator is greatly reduced, making the returns deficit all the more significant.²²

VIII. Explaining the Paradox: Efficiency, Inequality, and Governance

The book does not advance a definitive causal explanation for the investment-returns gap, but identifies three mutually reinforcing structural mechanisms that, taken together, provide a coherent account of it.

The first is efficiency deficits in service delivery. A significant share of the resources allocated to health and education in Guyana’s budget does not reach intended beneficiaries in the form of effective services. Procurement irregularities, administrative leakages, weak monitoring and evaluation systems, inadequate teacher and health worker performance incentives, and poor targeting of public spending all reduce the effective unit of human capital produced per dollar of public expenditure. IMF analysis of Guyana’s health spending (2025) confirms that expenditure efficiency — the ratio of outcomes to inputs — is below the regional average.²³

The second mechanism is income inequality. Evidence from Table 2 and from the IHDI calculation suggests that the aggregate human capital indicators mask substantial distributional disparities. Investment that disproportionately benefits already-advantaged coastal urban populations — at the expense of rural and hinterland communities, particularly those of Amerindian descent — yields lower aggregate returns per dollar spent than investment that reaches the most underserved. The IMF (2025) documents the rapid decline in the share of health and education budgets allocated to Guyana’s ten administrative regions, which house a disproportionate share of the country’s most vulnerable populations.²⁴

The third mechanism is governance failure. Guyana’s CPI score of 40 (2025) is consistent with a political economy in which resource rents create incentives for patronage rather than development. The authors of the study cite Goolsarran (2025), who documented Guyana’s position at the bottom of the CPI among Caribbean nations for four consecutive years, as evidence that the country’s public institutions are not yet capable of converting increased expenditure into commensurate service delivery.²⁵

Sri Lanka provides the most pointed counter-illustration. With a per-capita income in 2020 of only US$12,941 (PPP dollars) — 23 per cent below Guyana’s — and with investment rates lower than Guyana’s on most indicators, Sri Lanka achieved an adult survival rate of 90 per cent against Guyana’s 77 per cent, and a harmonised test score of 400 against Guyana’s 346. The explanation lies not in resources but in the quality of institutions: Sri Lanka’s primary health care system and its commitment to equity in education access have, over decades, generated human capital returns that far exceed what the investment figures alone would predict.

The three mechanisms interact and reinforce each other. High inequality reduces the political salience of poor service quality in underserved areas — keeping those communities politically marginalised. Governance failures reduce the accountability that would otherwise discipline efficient service delivery. And efficiency deficits reduce the perceived returns to investment, potentially dampening the social demand for reform. Breaking this cycle requires simultaneous action on all three fronts.

IX. Policy Recommendations

The book’s Chapter 11, ‘From Knowledge to Action,’ advances a detailed policy agenda. The following summarises the five highest-priority recommendations, framed by the book’s central prescription: before deciding whether to invest more in health and education, Guyana must understand why current investment yields so little. For the most part, it is already spending more than most of its comparators — the priority is efficiency, equity, and governance, not volume.²⁶

1. Comprehensive Stocktaking and a National Ten-Year Strategic Plan

Before any expanded investment programme is launched, Guyana needs a comprehensive, evidence-based stocktaking to assess the state of health and functional literacy in each of the ten administrative regions, identify the bottlenecks impeding service delivery, and evaluate the effectiveness of existing programmes. This stocktaking should underpin a ten-year strategic plan — a national human capital vision — with clear, time-bound, measurable targets aligned with both the intrinsic value of health and education and the country’s economic development priorities. Without such a plan, increased spending is likely to replicate the inefficiencies that sustain the 64/80 paradox.

2. Education Reform: Quality, Equity, and Technical-Vocational Pathways

The evidence points unambiguously to education quality — not the quantity of schooling — as the primary lever for improving Guyana’s human capital returns. Guyana’s expected years of schooling (13.0) are close to the comparator mean; its LAYS (6.8 years) and HTS (346) are far below it. The gap between expected years (13.0) and mean years (8.7) of schooling — 4.3 years — signals a serious school dropout and completion problem that must be addressed through targeted second-chance pathways. Teacher quality and incentives require urgent attention. Taiwan’s deliberate expansion of technical and vocational education, which channelled school-leavers into industry-aligned junior colleges in the 1960s–1980s, offers a directly applicable model for Guyana’s secondary tier. The University of Guyana requires a sustained long-term development plan to become a top regional research and teaching institution.

3. Health System Strengthening with a Primary-Care and Regional Focus

Improving health outcomes requires both upgrading existing facilities and reversing the declining share of health budgets allocated to the ten administrative regions. The rapid decline in regional health budget shares during the current administration is inconsistent with an equity-focused human capital strategy, given that regional populations are on average poorer and less healthy than those in Georgetown and its environs. Sri Lanka’s primary health care system — built over decades at relatively low cost — provides the most relevant international model. A sustained public health information campaign, expanded investment in nutrition and early childhood development, and a robust non-communicable disease prevention programme should be priorities within the health reform agenda.

4. Anti-Corruption and Independent Accountability Mechanisms

Independent auditing of social sector expenditure — with results reported publicly and linked to consequences for public officials — is a prerequisite for improving efficiency. An independent Human Capital Audit Body, reporting to Parliament rather than the executive, would provide the oversight needed to close the gap between budget and delivery. Guyana’s existing audit institutions require both capacity strengthening and genuine independence from political influence. On 7 September 2025, President Ali pledged to establish a dedicated Anti-Corruption Unit; the book’s analysis suggests that this unit’s remit should explicitly include the health and education sectors, where procurement volumes are large and oversight is historically weak.

5. Closing the Gender Gap, the AI Transition, and Lifelong Learning

The gender dimension of Guyana’s human capital deficit is among the sharpest illustrations of the 64/80 paradox: Guyanese women and girls out-perform men in education enrolment and completion, yet the female UHCI (0.21) is lower than the male UHCI (0.31) — a labour-market failure with significant aggregate economic costs. Eliminating structural barriers to female employment is both a social justice and economic efficiency imperative. Looking ahead, the rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence is reshaping the global labour market in ways that threaten the jobs currently performed by the majority of Guyanese workers. AI literacy must be integrated into the national curriculum as a core strand from secondary school. Singapore’s SkillsFuture programme — a nationwide, government-subsidised architecture for lifelong learning — provides the most relevant international template for a country facing Guyana’s combination of low LAYS, high NEET rates (approximately 46 per cent of youth aged 15–24), and rapid technological change.

X. Conclusion

The evidence assembled in this article tells a consistent and arresting story. Guyana invests more in human capital, measured across five internationally comparable indicators, than 64 per cent of an eighteen-country comparator sample spanning four world regions and a wide range of income levels. Yet 80 per cent of those same countries generate better human capital outcomes — measured by the HDI, the HCI, and their component indicators. This is the 64/80 paradox: investing more, returning less.

The paradox is not an artefact of any single data source or methodology. It appears in the WDI investment data, in the UNDP’s HDI, in the World Bank’s HCI, and in the component indicators of both — LAYS, HTS, the adult survival rate, and the utilisation-adjusted HCI. It is robust to the choice of investment indicator and to the selection of comparator countries. And it is growing more costly as oil revenues multiply the opportunity cost of inaction.²⁷

Guyana’s oil wealth creates an unprecedented fiscal opportunity to build world-class health and education systems within a generation. Crucially, the country’s fiscal window — and its demographic window — are simultaneously open. The country’s age structure is currently among the most favourable in the Caribbean, with 64.1 per cent of the population of working age and a median age of 27.2 years. The East Asian Tigers exploited comparable demographic windows in the 1960s to 1990s with transformative results; the distinguishing feature of their success was not higher spending but smarter spending, governed by accountable institutions aligned with economic need.

The path forward requires a fundamental improvement in the efficiency of public spending on health and education; a redistribution of investment toward the regions and communities currently least served; and a governance reform that holds public institutions accountable for results rather than expenditure. These are not technical challenges alone — they are political ones. The knowledge, as the book’s title asserts, already exists. The question is whether Guyana’s political leadership will act on it.

W. Arthur Lewis — the St. Lucian Nobel laureate whose words open this article — observed that the advantage of economic growth lies not in wealth itself but in what wealth makes possible: the expansion of human choice. By that measure, Guyana’s oil era has so far been a partial success. Incomes have risen dramatically; the range of choices available to the typical Guyanese citizen — in health, in education, in employment, in the prospects for the next generation — has not expanded commensurately. The 64/80 ratio is the arithmetic of that shortfall. Closing it will require more than the fiscal generosity Guyana has already demonstrated in its health and education budgets. It will require honesty about why the spending is not working, institutional discipline to fix what is broken, and the political will to measure governance by results rather than rhetoric. Guyana’s oil window will not remain open for ever. Its demographic window is narrower still. But while both remain open, no country in this hemisphere has greater reason for optimism — or less excuse for inaction.

Guyana already spends more than most of its comparators. The question is no longer how much, but why so little comes back.

Endnotes

1. GDP growth data from Gampat and Mahabir (2026: Table 1.1), based on MoF (2026a). Per capita GNI (2021 PPP dollars) from UNDP (2025: Table 1).
2. Health and education budget data from MoF (2026a). Per capita spending trajectory calculated by the authors from MoF data for 2014–2026.
3. Gampat and Mahabir (2026: Chapter 10, Section IV). The 64/80 ratio is the book’s central summary finding.
4. Schultz, T.W. (1961). ‘Investment in Human Capital.’ American Economic Review, 51(1): 1–17. Becker, G. (1964). Human Capital. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
5. Romer, P.M. (1990). ‘Endogenous Technological Change.’ Journal of Political Economy, 98(5): S71–S102. Lucas, R.E. (1988). ‘On the Mechanics of Economic Development.’ Journal of Monetary Economics, 22(1): 3–42.
6. Psacharopoulos, G. and Patrinos, H.A. (2018). ‘Returns to Investment in Education: A Decennial Review of the Global Literature.’ Education Economics, 26(5): 445–458.
7. World Bank (2018). World Development Report 2019: The Changing Nature of Work. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. World Bank (2021a). The Human Capital Index 2020 Update. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.
8. Gampat and Mahabir (2026: Chapter 2). Constitution of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana (1980), Articles 24 and 27.
9. GDP composition data from MoF (2026a) and Bank of Guyana Annual Reports, 2018–2025. See Gampat and Mahabir (2026: Table 1.1 and Figure 1.1).
10. Transparency International (2026). Corruption Perceptions Index 2025. https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025/index/guy. Accessed 16 June 2026. See also Goolsarran (2025) and Thomas, Abts and Stroeken (2024).
11. Quoted in Crowley (2026) and reproduced in Gampat and Mahabir (2026: Chapter 10, p. 246).
12. PCI data from World Bank (2025), World Development Indicators. 2020 current PPP dollars.
13. UNDP (2025: Table 1). Guyana’s HDI = 0.776; mean for high human development countries = 0.754 (Table 6.3 of the book); HDI of 0.776 is at the boundary with the very high group (threshold = 0.800).
14. HDI dimension indices from UNDP (2025), as reported in Gampat and Mahabir (2026: Table 9.3).
15. GNI rank minus HDI rank data from UNDP (2025), as reported in Gampat and Mahabir (2026: Table 7.1). Guyana’s differential = −54 in 2023.
16. IHDI calculations in Gampat and Mahabir (2026: Tables 7.3 and 7.4). The income inequality assumption uses Brazil’s Gini coefficient (52.0) as a proxy for Guyana’s, which is not reported by UNDP.
17. World Bank (2021a). Guyana HCI = 0.495 (range 0.48–0.51). See also Table 9.1 in Gampat and Mahabir (2026).
18. HTS data from World Bank (2021a), as reported in Gampat and Mahabir (2026: Tables 9.2 and 9.3). HTS is expressed in TIMSS-equivalent units; 625 = advanced attainment; 300 = minimum.
19. Adult survival rate data from World Bank (2021a), as reported in Table 9.3.
20. UHCI data from World Bank (2021b) and Gampat and Mahabir (2026: Table 9.5). LAC UHCI average from World Bank regional aggregates.
21. Gampat and Mahabir (2026: Chapter 10, Section IV, ‘The 64/80 Ratio’).
22. Non-oil GDP and non-oil per capita income from Bank of Guyana Annual Reports and MoF (2026a). See Gampat and Mahabir (2026: Table 6.5) for non-oil HDI calculations.
23. IMF (2025). Guyana: 2025 Article IV Consultation. Washington, D.C.: IMF.
24. Regional budget allocation data from MoF regional budget estimates for 2020–2026, as analysed in Gampat and Mahabir (2026: Chapters 3 and 4).
25. Goolsarran, A. (2025). ‘Corruption in Guyana: The Accountability Deficit.’ Stabroek News, 12 March 2025. Thomas, Abts and Stroeken (2024).
26. Gampat and Mahabir (2026: Chapter 11).
27. Gampat and Mahabir (2026: Chapter 10, concluding paragraphs).

References

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