Which One Is Telling You the Truth About Guyana
The IMF says the outlook is highly favourable. Bloomberg says the poverty data is hidden. Both are right. Here is what neither is telling you.
On the same day this week, two of the world’s most respected economic institutions published their assessments of Guyana. The International Monetary Fund, following its annual Article IV consultation with the government, declared the economic outlook highly favourable, praised the management of the economy, and issued a concluding statement full of commendations for fiscal prudence and governance progress. Bloomberg, the global financial intelligence organisation, published a column from a journalist who had just walked the streets of Georgetown and reported that the government is deliberately hiding poverty statistics, that a poverty estimate covering the years of extraordinary oil-driven growth does not exist, and that the country’s data compass appears broken.
Both of these accounts are true. Both of them are partial. And understanding the gap between them is the most important economic literacy exercise any Guyanese citizen can undertake right now. Because the gap is not a disagreement between institutions. It is the distance between two different definitions of the word ‘Guyana.’
The IMF is measuring Guyana from 120 miles offshore, where the oil is. Bloomberg is measuring Guyana from a Georgetown street corner, where the people are. They are not seeing the same country. The question is not which report is right. The question is which country you live in.
What the IMF Said: The Numbers Are Real
Let us be fair to the IMF. Its numbers are accurate. Guyana’s macroeconomic performance since first oil in 2019 has been, by any conventional measure, extraordinary.
Real GDP growth 2025: 19.4% following average growth of nearly 40% during 2023 and 2024
Oil production: 900,000+ barrels per day by end 2025, up 35% in a single year
Non-oil economy growth: ~14% with construction the largest driver
Unemployment: 6.2% down significantly from pre-oil levels
Inflation: 3.3% in 2025 among the lowest in Latin America and the Caribbean
NRF balance: US$4.1 billion end of April 2026
Debt-to-GDP ratio: one of the lowest in the entire Western Hemisphere
These figures are not government propaganda. They are IMF-verified assessments based on independent analysis. The growth is real. The oil production is real. The low inflation is real, at least as measured by the official consumer price index. The debt position is genuinely strong. When the IMF says the economic outlook is highly favourable, it is not lying.
But the IMF is also measuring a specific set of things. It is measuring aggregate GDP, monetary aggregates, fiscal balances, debt ratios, and inflation indices. It is measuring the economy that appears in official statistics. It is not measuring how many people in Buxton can afford to eat three meals a day. It is not measuring the rent a young family pays in Georgetown on a salary that has not kept pace with the cost of living in an oil-boom economy. It is not measuring the contractor who got the government deal because of who he knows rather than what he can build.
There is also something the IMF’s concluding statement did not mention. Not once. Anywhere. Seventy-three people died on the MV Barima on July 18, 2026. Thirty more are still missing. The IMF team was in Guyana between July 20 and July 31, two days after the capsizing, meeting with the Finance Minister and senior officials. The concluding statement contains no reference to the disaster, no mention of the governance failures it exposed, and no comment on what it reveals about the oversight of state assets. The IMF measured Guyana’s economy while bodies were still being pulled from the Pomeroon. Its report did not notice.
What Bloomberg Said: The Gaps Are Also Real
Bloomberg columnist Juan Spinetto visited Georgetown and made several observations that deserve to be taken seriously precisely because they come from a publication that is not ideologically hostile to Guyana and has no political axe to grind in Guyanese domestic politics.
The most damaging observation is about data. The government took three years to publish a preliminary report from the 2022 census and the final results are still pending. There is no official poverty estimate covering the years of extraordinary oil-driven growth. When Bloomberg asked Finance Minister Ashni Singh about this, he argued that poverty should be measured across multiple dimensions including access to healthcare, education, and sanitation. That is a defensible methodological position. It is also a very convenient one for a government that may not want the single-number poverty headline in circulation.
The poverty estimates in circulation tell a story the government has not resolved. The Inter-American Development Bank estimates poverty in Guyana at 58 percent. Some local economists estimate it at 18 to 20 percent. The World Bank’s last verified figure, from 2019, was 48.4 percent. Three years of extraordinary growth have passed since that measurement. No authoritative update exists. Bloomberg’s description of a broken data compass is accurate.
Bloomberg also cited a University of Guyana GREEN Institute poll whose findings are more nuanced than either the IMF’s optimism or the opposition’s pessimism would suggest. Forty-two percent of respondents were somewhat or very optimistic about the country’s outlook over the next twenty years. Forty percent described themselves as somewhat or very pessimistic. Forty-three percent said the benefits of growth are real but unevenly distributed. Twenty-seven percent said the economy being built is simply not the kind of society they want. And foreign oil companies were ranked as the least trusted institutions included in the survey.
That last finding should stop every Guyanese policymaker cold. The companies extracting the nation’s wealth are trusted less than any other institution in the country. In a nation where 43 percent of people say the benefits are real but unevenly distributed, and 27 percent say the economy being built is not the society they want, the government’s political risk is not an economic contraction. It is a legitimacy crisis.
The Reality on the Ground: What Neither Report Tells You
This is the section of the analysis that neither the IMF concluding statement nor the Bloomberg column can fully capture, because it requires being Guyanese, living in Guyana, and watching what happens to public money when it leaves the NRF and enters the procurement system.
The Gas-to-Energy Disaster
The single most instructive example of the gap between the macro numbers and the ground reality is the Gas-to-Energy project at Wales, West Bank Demerara. It is also the example the government most wants the public not to examine too closely.
In November 2022, the government signed a US$759 million contract with a consortium of Lindsayca Inc. and CH4 Systems LLC to build a natural gas liquids plant and a 300-megawatt power station. The contract was supposed to deliver power to Guyanese homes and businesses by December 2024. That deadline passed. Then 2025 passed. As of mid-2026, the plant is still under construction.
The delays are not merely inconvenient. They are expensive. The two-year delay in the startup of the GTE project has cost this country approximately US$619 million in fuel imports alone, as Guyana was forced to continue importing heavy fuel oil while waiting for the gas plant that would replace it. The government also hired two Turkish powerships to supplement the national grid at a daily rental cost of GY$126 million. Add those costs together and the delay is costing Guyana approximately US$884 million more than the original contract.
There is more. The government lost an arbitration filed by the Lindsayca-CH4 consortium and was required to pay approximately US$82 to US$97 million in settlement. This payment was made quietly, without public announcement, and the government initially denied it. The project director installed by Lindsayca after CH4 was removed from the consortium has been linked, through investigative reporting by Kaieteur News, to a corruption scandal in Venezuela. The original evaluation that recommended the higher-priced Lindsayca bid over a competing bid that was nearly half the price was unanimous, included a representative from ExxonMobil, and has never been publicly explained.
The total projected cost of the GTE project has grown from US$759 million to approximately US$2 billion when all components are included. The power the government promised would be delivered to GPL customers, reducing their electricity bills by 50 percent, is now expected in December 2026 at the earliest, with full operations in 2027. The powerships, hidden contracts, secret arbitration, Venezuelan-linked project leadership, and ballooning costs are not in the IMF concluding statement. They are in the ground reality.
The NRF has received US$9.3 billion in oil revenues since 2020. More than US$6 billion has already been spent through the national budget. The question of what was bought with that money, who got the contracts, and how the procurement decisions were made is the central unresolved governance question in Guyana’s oil era. The IMF urged better procurement oversight. It did not examine whether the oversight that already exists is being used.
The Contracts Nobody Can See
The GTE project is not an isolated case. It is part of a broader pattern that Transparency International, academic researchers, and Guyanese investigative journalists have documented independently and consistently.
Academic research published in the European Procurement and Public Private Partnership Law Review in 2025 concluded that while Guyana’s public procurement legislative framework is capable of promoting active transparency, these measures are ineffective in practice, given the prevalence of corruption fuelled partly by internal stakeholders’ reluctance to formally highlight anomalies and the limited horizontal accountability among high-ranking government officials.
Transparency International has flagged worsening corruption in Guyana’s public sector, pointing specifically to procurement practices and the awarding of government contracts. The government has been accused of favouring friends, family members, and close allies in contract awards. A former CEO of the Central Housing and Planning Authority resigned amid allegations concerning questionable property deals and land sales. The Labour Ministry’s Permanent Secretary was sanctioned by the United States Government for corruption. The government has hidden contracts for major gold mining investments from the public and from Parliament, publishing announcements of the deals in press statements while declining to show the actual agreements.
Bloomberg noted correctly that during periods of high oil prices, governments can be tempted to channel jobs, contracts, and flagship projects toward political supporters and allied regions rather than where they generate the greatest public benefit, creating fertile ground for patronage and corruption. In Guyana’s case, this is not a theoretical risk. It is a documented pattern.
The People the Numbers Do Not Count
GDP per capita in Guyana reached US$29,883 in 2024. That is a number that would represent a middle-income country by international standards. It is also a number that has almost no relationship to the lived experience of a significant portion of the Guyanese population.
GDP per capita is an average. It divides the total output of the economy by the number of people in the country. When oil production adds billions of dollars to the numerator while the denominator, the population, remains around one million, the per capita figure rises dramatically regardless of whether a single additional dollar reaches the pockets of ordinary Guyanese. Guyana’s GDP per capita has surged because the oil sector is producing extraordinary value. The oil sector directly employs a small fraction of the workforce. The wealth it generates flows primarily to the government through the NRF, to the foreign oil companies through profit oil, and to the contractors and connected intermediaries who capture public spending.
A walk through Georgetown confirms what the statistics cannot capture. Stabroek News and independent observers have noted rampant poverty and homelessness visible along the coast and in the capital despite the oil-induced transformation of the economy’s aggregate numbers. Food inflation, running at 5.9 to 6.7 percent in early 2026, is hitting low-income households hardest, exactly as the World Bank noted. The CPI for Georgetown in January 2026 showed vegetables and vegetable products rising 4.2 percent in a single month. For a family spending 50 to 60 percent of its income on food, as lower-income households in developing economies typically do, that is not a statistic. It is a decision between eating and paying rent.
The Sovereign Wealth Fund That Is Not Saving
The Natural Resource Fund, which the IMF commends and the government promotes as evidence of fiscal responsibility, deserves closer examination than it typically receives.
Since 2020, the NRF has received approximately US$9.3 billion in oil revenues. More than US$6 billion of that has already been transferred to the national budget. In 2025, the government withdrew US$2.46 billion, effectively spending virtually 100 percent of the oil revenues earned that year. The 2026 approved withdrawal is US$2.37 billion, the first year the drawdown has fallen from the previous year, and largely because oil revenues themselves were slightly lower due to price movements rather than a policy decision to save more.
The purpose of a sovereign wealth fund in a resource-dependent economy is to smooth consumption over time, save for future generations, and protect the economy from the volatility of commodity prices. Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, the model that every resource-rich developing nation is urged to emulate, retains the vast majority of its oil revenues invested abroad and spends only a capped percentage annually. Guyana’s NRF, by contrast, is functioning more as a pass-through account than a savings vehicle. Money flows in and flows out in the same fiscal year at rates that leave a balance of approximately US$4 billion in a fund that has handled US$9.3 billion in total inflows. The IMF has flagged this, noting that if oil prices remain persistently high, a larger share of additional oil revenue should be saved. The government has not committed to doing so.
So Who Is Lying? Nobody. And That Is the Problem.
Having examined both reports and the ground reality between them, Guyana1News offers the following assessment. Nobody is lying. And that is precisely what makes the situation dangerous.
The IMF is accurately measuring the macroeconomic indicators it is designed to measure. Guyana’s GDP growth is extraordinary. Its oil production is extraordinary. Its debt position is strong. Its inflation, as officially measured, is low. The IMF’s mandate is not to investigate individual contract awards, to assess the quality of public procurement decisions, or to measure how poverty is distributed within an economy whose aggregate numbers are rising. It measures what it measures. And what it measures, in Guyana, looks very good.
Bloomberg is accurately observing the absence of reliable poverty data, the visible inequality on Georgetown’s streets, and the structural risks of an oil economy. Its columnist is right that the government may be withholding poverty statistics for political reasons. He is right that the public mood is more complex than the growth numbers suggest. He is right that foreign oil companies are the least trusted institutions in a survey of Guyanese citizens. His observations are grounded in evidence.
But what neither report captures, and what the Guyanese public most needs to understand, is this: the gap between the macroeconomic success and the lived reality of ordinary Guyanese is not a natural outcome of oil-driven development. It is a governance choice. Every contract that goes to the connected instead of the competent narrows the benefit that reaches the people. Every government building built with uncertified blocks narrows it further. Every procurement decision made behind closed doors, every contract hidden from Parliament, every arbitration settlement paid quietly while the public is told nothing, every poverty statistic withheld because the number might be politically inconvenient: these are not the inevitable products of an oil boom. They are decisions. And decisions can be changed.
Guyana is producing extraordinary wealth. The extraordinary wealth is producing extraordinary growth statistics. The extraordinary growth statistics are producing IMF commendations. And on the streets of Georgetown, people are watching excavators build the future and wondering when the future includes them.
The Question the IMF Did Not Ask
The IMF team visited Guyana between July 20 and July 31. On July 18, two days before they arrived, the MV Barima capsized off the Pomeroon coast, killing 73 people and leaving 30 more missing. The vessel was 87 years old. It was operating under a regulatory framework that recorded ticket purchases as passenger manifests. It was built for a British colony and pressed into service in a booming 21st-century oil economy. It was carrying substandard manifests, possible substandard cargo loads, and passengers whose presence was not formally documented.
The IMF’s concluding statement mentions governance. It mentions procurement. It mentions cost-oil audits and anti-money laundering frameworks. It does not mention the MV Barima. It does not mention the 73 dead. It does not note that the disaster exposes precisely the governance gaps that good oil revenue management is supposed to fund the closure of: regulatory oversight, transport safety, infrastructure quality, and the basic protection of citizens using government services.
The IMF commended the government for sustained prudent fiscal policies. It said public spending should continue to prioritize productivity-enhancing projects and support the most vulnerable. The MV Barima carried some of the most vulnerable people in Guyana: residents of Region One, the North West District, one of the most geographically isolated and economically marginalised regions in the country, people who had no alternative to a government ferry that had not been fit for purpose since before any of them were born.
Prudent fiscal policy did not keep the Barima seaworthy. Extraordinary GDP growth did not give its passengers a manifest that counted them. Favourable economic outlook did not give them certified blocks in the walls of the buildings they came home to. The gap between the macroeconomic Guyana and the everyday Guyana is measured not only in poverty statistics. It is measured in the distance between a glowing IMF statement and a government ferry on the seabed.
The numbers are real.
The people are also real.
The gap between the two is real.
Source: Guyana1news
