Guyana has huge entrepreneurial potential – UWI professor

By Danielle Campbell

Guyana has wonderful advantages, including its South American Location, and Caricom membership, and beautiful natural endowments in the areas of energy and minerals mining.

This is according to Executive Director of the University of the West Indies’ Arthur Lok Jack Graduate School of Business, Professor Miguel Carrillo. Carrillo advised that Guyana should not only focus on the exploration and exploitation of oil, but on the development of a related industry such as petro-chemicals or plastics.

He also suggested the development of adventure tourism, and the manufacturing of glass or aluminium for which Guyana has cheap energy, raw material and market access. However, the professor pointed out that the challenge for Guyana remains the manner in which to invest in such a complex and high-tech industry.

In this regard, the graduate school is preparing to host the first regional forum on cluster development which is being touted as critical to the destiny of the Caribbean, especially Guyana. Professor Carrillo said that the executives are in Guyana to update the private sector and the business community about the cluster development forum.

The event slated for November 9 in Trinidad and Tobago will see experts from around the world sharing best practices on how clusters in different countries, sectors, and regions have been instrumental in promoting competitiveness and productivity. Carrillo sought to explain why such an event is crucial to Guyana’s development.

Guyana is a very small economy right now and one of the smallest in the world in terms of critical mass and market size, and it’s the country that has grown in the last 10 years a little bit more than four per cent,” Carrillo remarked. While four per cent is not bad in terms of growth over the last 10 years, Carrillo believes the problem lies in the fact that the economic base is too small.

He explained, that should a country grow by four points every year, it is expected that the size of the economy would double in 20 years.

“That’s not good enough when the economy is so small relative to the potential here.

In the United States, four per cent would be a lot of growth,” Carrillo said.

Export-driven growth

He stated that the logic about increasing productivity is so important, since all Caribbean states are quite small. The professor pointed out that improving competitiveness through cluster development is important to the Caribbean, since there is not enough resource-based industries, no critical mass of industries which allow specialisation, and an inadequate market size.

“Therefore, any growth opportunities must come from abroad; especially from economies that are larger than ours,” Carrillo stressed.

He noted that without Haiti, the Caricom market stands in the vicinity of about six million people, compared to the population of Colombia which is 48 million or Venezuela with its 19 million people. Even as a region, the Caribbean is still very insignificant.

One of the critical aspects to be tackled at the regional forum is the identification of ways in which entrepreneurs can actually be part of these regional markets and insert themselves in a cluster of tourism or energy where they are likely to collaborate or compete with other firms.

The most important objective of the regional forum is to provide guidance and direction to private sector and entrepreneurs in identifying the relevant opportunities in the region.

Based on research conducted in the region, the Caribbean has experienced an interesting phenomenon where entrepreneurial ventures are too basic, traditional and do not allow for high growth potential at the global scale.

“Caribbean people are pro-entrepreneurial especially when it comes to global trading, we like to try new things and that is not the problem, but the opportunities are not relevant… Real entrepreneurs are not the ones with potential to start businesses; anybody can do that. The real entrepreneurs are the ones who are able to grow business systemically and out of time.” He emphasised that real entrepreneurs are the ones who create jobs, take risks, and are obsessed with making their business grow.

He said the role of the School of Business is to assist in identifying sectors which will remain attractive and the dynamics of change in those sectors from a regional perspective.

Carrillo, whose career spans 21 years in 12 different countries and three languages, is expected to meet several companies including Demerara Distillers Limited, Republic Bank, Neal and Massey among others.

The Arthur Lok Jack Graduate School of Business is the only one of its type in the Caribbean with more than 800 students in 10 different programmes.