Guyana mounted its first official national presence at Toronto this September. The question that follows is not whether Guyana can host films, but whether Guyana can own them.
The Mighty Sparrow died in New York on 27 September at ninety-one. In 1956 he won his first Calypso King title in Port of Spain, the same year my great uncle Winston “Uncle Charlie” Lewis carried the Invaders to victory at Georgetown’s Astor Cinema. An appreciation of the Caribbean’s auditor in verse, and a question for Guyana: who is singing the audit now?
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.
Rory Fraser’s study of land tenure, forestry enforcement and the public service reaches the same conclusion as Gampat and Mahabir’s 64/80 paradox by a different road, and asks why the failures they measure outlast changes of government.
Drawing on a book-length comparative study of eighteen countries, Ramesh Gampat and Minakshi Mahabir document what they call the 64/80 paradox: Guyana out-invests 64 per cent of its comparators in health and education, yet 80 per cent of them obtain better human capital outcomes. Efficiency deficits, inequality and governance failure explain the gap — and the oil window for closing it will not stay open for ever.
Nearly seventy-five years after Martin Carter first refused to still his voice, the closing line of “Looking at Your Hands” has become a national slogan. This Sunday Essay asks what it would mean to treat it instead as a standard, and to hold the M/V Barima inquiry, the closure of Stabroek News, and the institutions of the oil era answerable to the poem.
Oil Sector Policy · Analysis The Empty Rig Floor What ExxonMobil’s Permian Automation May Mean for Guyana’s Next Oil Decade A contractor in West Texas now moves two-thousand-pound drill…
GBJ Commentary · Trade & Investment A Trade Centre Is Not Yet Trade What the WTC Georgetown Conference Should Be Measured By Five days in Kingston, a first anniversary,…
What a nation built of journeys owes the stranger on the West Coast.
The Sunday Essay · Political Economy Adam Smith Visits Guyana The Wealth of a Nation Is Its People Imagine the professor of moral philosophy landing at Timehri in the…