Guyanese human development

After great soul searching and debate in 1990, the UNDP issued its first “Human Development Report”, which introduced the concept of a Human Development Index (HDI). It was a bold effort led by development economists such as Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen to offer a more nuanced metric than “economic growth” or Gross National Income to measure progress in human well-being.

The HDI was a composite measure of three basic dimensions of human development: health, education and income. It is adjusted for economic inequality and helps us assess better the levels of development for all segments of society, rather than for just the mythical ‘average’ person.

A country’s perfect score would be one – for instance, this year’s top performer, Norway came in at .963.

In 1990, Guyana’s HDI was .489 but with the return of the PPP/C to office after decades of electoral rigging, that figure was placed on an ever upward trajectory. This year it climbed to .633. Disaggregated, these figures reveal that in 1990, life expectancy was 61 years at birth as opposed to 69.9 this year; expected years of schooling increased from 10.3 years to 11.9 years; mean years of schooling from 6.4 years to eight years.

The Gross National Income per capita (measured in 2005 PPP$) jumped from US$ 1038 to $3192. In terms of ranking Guyana is now 117th out of 187 countries in the HDR. The HDR has incorporated data going back to 1980 and this allows one to discern the crucial element that has dictated our development since then: from 1980 to 1990 by every measure our performance had plummeted to historic lows. The PNC had squandered the hard-won gains achieved by the PPP between 1957 and 1964. The economy and the society had both been destroyed.

In the meantime, other countries, to which we are now being compared, had not frittered away their inheritance on unrealistic, grandiose schemes – further undermined by massive corruption – but had rather moved on the virtuous path of sustainable development. Guyana’s overall rating compared to say, T& T’s, suffers because the low Gross National Income component was caused by the need to rebuild our economic infrastructure from a low base from 1992 onwards.

Guyanese still do not appreciate the disadvantage – amounting to a debilitating handicap – of rehabilitating much less enlarging an economy not only saddled by overwhelming debt (five times the export earnings by 1990) but unable to access private financing (Burnham had refused to service debts by 1983). The political instability instigated through opposition protests and other violent shenanigans in the post 1992-era has been an albatross on the government’s efforts to attract foreign direct investments. The fact that they have been able to do as well as they have done is a tribute to their tenacity. Guyana has actually narrowed the gap with Dominican Republic and Bolivia with which it has been compared by the UNDP Report since 1990.

The HDI’s constituent elements demonstrate graphically the effects of the collapse of the economy. Guyanese should not be surprised at the fall in school attendance during the eighties. The entire educational system had collapsed and there were no incentives for pursuing an education – there were no jobs. How could life expectancy not decrease when vital foodstuffs were banned and the medical system had imploded? The economy has been stabilised and returned to a positive growth trajectory.

Within the constraints of the inherited anaemic economic base, the government has lived up to the essential thrust of the new meaning of human development by devoting an extraordinary percentage of the budget to the social sector.

The rise in our HDI ranking comes to life if we honestly answer the question, “Are our lives better than it was a decade ago?” Yes, they are.