Letters · Response · Human Capital in the Oil Era
A study built from land tenure, forestry enforcement and the condition of the public service arrives where Gampat and Mahabir’s cross-country indicators did — and asks why the failures they measure outlast governments.
By Dr Rory Fraser · September 2026
In response to “The Human Capital Paradox in Guyana: Investing More, Returning Less” by Ramesh Gampat and Minakshi Mahabir (GBJ, 15 September 2026).
FOREWORD. When we published Ramesh Gampat and Minakshi Mahabir’s analysis of the 64/80 paradox on 15 September, we said that we would welcome response, including dissent, and publish it. The first substantial response to reach us is not dissent. It is concurrence, and of a kind that bears on how much weight the original finding can carry. Rory Fraser reports that his own study of the petroleum era — built from land tenure, forestry enforcement, sovereign-wealth governance and the condition of the public service rather than from cross-country indicators — arrives at very nearly the same place. The two studies share neither sources nor method, which is what makes their agreement worth a reader’s attention.
Fraser also does what a good respondent should. He names what the comparative method achieves that his own could not, and he puts a question to the authors: why do the deficits they measure survive changes of government? He suggests the answer bears on the design of the independent audit body they propose. That is the conversation we hoped the article would open. We invite Dr Gampat and Ms Mahabir to take it up in these pages, and we repeat our invitation to readers who see the matter differently. Fraser’s account of his own work is his; the figures he cites from the Gampat–Mahabir study we have checked against the published tables. The letter appears below, edited lightly for house style. — The Editors
I read Ramesh Gampat and Minakshi Mahabir’s analysis with the particular interest of someone who has spent the past several years working over much of the same ground from a different direction, and I write to say plainly that I concur with their central finding and to commend the rigour with which they have established it.
My own work, a book-length study of Guyana’s development trajectory and a series of accompanying essays, approaches the petroleum era through the accumulated evidence of land tenure, forestry enforcement, sovereign-wealth governance, and the general condition of the public service. Gampat and Mahabir approach the same era through five World Bank investment indicators, the Human Development Index, and the Human Capital Index, benchmarked against eighteen comparator countries. We did not compare notes. We used different sources, different disciplines, and different methods, and we arrived, independently, at very nearly the same conclusion: that Guyana’s petroleum wealth has expanded far faster than the institutional capability required to convert it into durable national progress. When two studies built from unrelated evidence bases land in the same place, that convergence deserves more weight than either study carries alone, and I did not want it to pass unremarked.
When two studies built from unrelated evidence bases land in the same place, that convergence deserves more weight than either study carries alone.
The overlap runs deeper than the headline finding. My own chapters describe thin public-sector capacity, geographic inequality between the coast and the interior, and corruption risk in resource allocation as recurring structural problems; Gampat and Mahabir’s efficiency, inequality, and governance mechanisms are the same diagnosis, measured with a precision in the health and education sectors that I did not attempt. Most strikingly, I had argued at length that the University of Guyana needed to become a permanent national learning institution, and their study, entirely independently, calls for the same sustained investment in the university’s development. Neither of us knew the other would arrive there.
I want to be equally candid that our approaches differ, and usefully so. Their comparative method lets them show, 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, a claim only a properly constructed cross-country dataset can support and one my institutional case histories could not have produced. I do not think my method could improve on theirs in that respect, and I say so without reservation.
Where I believe my own work adds something to theirs is in the explanation of why the failures they document persist across changes in government. Their account identifies efficiency and governance deficits with real precision but does not fully explain their durability. My own essays point to a political economy of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, to the political rewards of announcement over the political costs of enforcement, and to the way ethnic-coded political competition converts ordinary administrative discretion into a question of group security. I would welcome the authors’ engagement with that layer of the argument, since I suspect it bears directly on the design of the independent audit body they rightly propose.
None of this qualifies my overall assessment. Gampat and Mahabir have done Guyana a service by subjecting a widely shared intuition, that spending has outpaced results, to a standard of evidence that a sceptical reader has to answer rather than merely consider. Their five recommendations, from a regional stocktaking to an audit body independent of the executive, deserve serious attention from anyone concerned with how the country’s fiscal and demographic windows are used while both remain open. I hope this letter is read as what it is intended to be: agreement from an independent quarter, offered with genuine respect for the study’s method and findings.
Rory Fraser
17 September 2026
Dr Rory Fraser is an environmental economist and land tenure scholar, and a retired professor of forest economics and policy. A USDA–Kellogg Academic Leadership Fellow, he served as Faculty Senate President and as a Board Member at Alabama A&M University, and was Visiting Professor at the University of Guyana in 2009–10 and 2011. He has consulted on University of Guyana funding options, the Guyana National Forest Policy, mangrove rehabilitation, food security in the Rupununi, and World Bank support for UG’s STEM programmes, and has published research on Caribbean forest policy and forest-based economic development.
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 author’s own.
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