Development Performance and Economic Policy in Guyana, 1990-2021
This chapter evaluates Guyana's economic performance since 1990, using the UNDP's Human Development Index. The confident expectations for Guyana's resource-rich economy in the 1970s were defeated by a failed experiment in state control which caused a major regression in economic development in the 1980s. By 1990 Guyana had fallen behind the rest of the Caribbean - Haiti excepted - in the HDI rankings. By that date, however, the last of the controls that had strangled production were being dismantled.