Guyana, the Caribbean coun­try that bor­ders on South Amer­i­ca is set to reg­is­ter the largest eco­nom­ic growth in the world in 2020.

This is ac­cord­ing to pro­jec­tions laid out by the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund.

For 2019, the coun­try is ex­pect­ed to grow by 4.4 per cent, while in 2020 it is pro­ject­ed to grow by 85.6 per cent.

The coun­try is al­so pro­ject­ed to have an eco­nom­ic growth rate of 4.8 per cent, 20.6 per cent, 26.2 per cent and 3.2 per cent for the years 2021 to 2024, re­spec­tive­ly.

This, while Trinidad’s 2019 pro­jec­tion is at 0 per cent and in 2020, the econ­o­my is set to grow by 1.5 per cent.

For the years 2021 to 2024, T&T is pro­ject­ed to grow at 2.3 per cent, 2 per cent, 1.6 per cent and 1.7 per cent re­spec­tive­ly.

The rea­son for Guyana’s ex­plo­sive growth rests on its com­mence­ment in oil pro­duc­tion next month, which al­so has many an­tic­i­pat­ing a change eco­nom­ic for­tunes of the coun­try.

Based on IMF cal­cu­la­tions, the oil sec­tor in the coun­try will rep­re­sent about 40% of the econ­o­my with­in five years.

Guyana’s $4 bil­lion an­nu­al gross do­mes­tic prod­uct, ac­cord­ing to the IMF, will ex­pand to about $15 bil­lion by 2024.

Re­ports in­di­cate that the gov­ern­ment plans to use some of the mon­ey de­rived from its roy­al­ties to build high­ways to con­nect coastal towns to the sparse­ly pop­u­lat­ed in­te­ri­or, which has gold, di­a­mond and baux­ite de­posits.

How­ev­er, the or­gan­i­sa­tion has not­ed that its fore­cast may be sub­ject to large re­vi­sions since even small changes to the pro­ject­ed oil out­put in 2020 would re­sult in ma­jor shifts in the over­all eco­nom­ic per­for­mance.

Exxon, one of the com­pa­nies set to de­vel­op the new deep-wa­ter oil dis­cov­er­ies off the coun­try’s coast, has re­port­ed that it will be­gin pump­ing from its first oil in De­cem­ber, and by 2025 Guyana will pro­duce at least 750,000 bar­rels a day.

The gov­ern­ment of Guyana ex­pects the ini­tial $300 mil­lion a year in rev­enue from prof­it-shar­ing and roy­al­ties to more than dou­ble af­ter a sec­ond off­shore well starts pro­duc­tion around 2022.

The Guyanese gov­ern­ment has in­di­cat­ed that the gains will go di­rect­ly to a sov­er­eign wealth fund the coun­try es­tab­lished in 2019, which will be used as a sav­ings fund that will con­tin­ue for gen­er­a­tions, to pro­tect against oil price shifts, and to fund de­vel­op­ment plans.