Dr Ash­ni Singh de­liv­ered his first na­tion­al bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion as Guyana’s Fi­nance Min­is­ter on Feb­ru­ary 2, 2007.

“Madam Speak­er, we in Guyana have much for which we should be thank­ful. Al­though the floods of ear­ly 2006 threat­ened to de­rail many of our pro­grammes and to un­der­mine our tar­gets, we were nev­er­the­less able to man­age the econ­o­my ef­fec­tive­ly and re­turn sub­stan­tial re­al growth,” Singh said then.

The flood­ing Singh was re­fer­ring to then was ris­ing wa­ter lev­els that af­fect­ed Guyana and its peo­ple.

Now 16 years lat­er, Guyana and its peo­ple are fac­ing the ef­fects of a dif­fer­ent kind of flood, with an in­flux of in­ter­est in their oil dis­cov­er­ies and the eco­nom­ic for­tunes ex­pect­ed to come as a re­sult of those finds.

In that 2007 pre­sen­ta­tion, Singh laud­ed the eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment of Guyana de­scrib­ing the re­al growth of 4.7 per cent the coun­try had achieved as “a most com­mend­able per­for­mance.”

That eco­nom­ic per­for­mance, how­ev­er, now pales in com­par­i­son to the fig­ures that Guyana has been achiev­ing.

“We’ve been able to achieve world-beat­ing re­al eco­nom­ic growth and ex­pan­sion and not on­ly in a sin­gle year. You would have heard that last year we were the fastest-grow­ing econ­o­my in the world with over 62 per cent re­al growth.

“Not on­ly last year, but in fact start­ing from 2020, first oil hav­ing been pro­duced in De­cem­ber 2019 from 2020 on­wards, we’ve achieved ex­treme­ly strong re­al eco­nom­ic growth over­all and the out­look re­mains ex­treme­ly favourable so we are look­ing at 2023 pro­ject­ed eco­nom­ic growth of 25.1 per cent,” Singh told the In­ter­na­tion­al En­er­gy Con­fer­ence held in George­town.

“And in the medi­um term for the next three to four years sus­tained eco­nom­ic growth in ex­cess of 25 per cent,” he said.

This achieve­ment of sus­tained eco­nom­ic growth of 25 per cent is rare in any eco­nom­ic con­text.

“Over the last three years, the Guyanese econ­o­my has tripled in size. Our nom­i­nal GDP, the size of the econ­o­my, broke the one tril­lion dol­lar mark in 2019 for the first time. In 2019 we end­ed the year with nom­i­nal GDP of 1.078 tril­lion Guyana dol­lars, we end­ed 2022 with nom­i­nal GDP in ex­cess of 3 tril­lion Guyana dol­lars so over the space of three years the size of the econ­o­my has tripled,” Singh said.

In 1991 Guyana’s pub­lic debt to GDP ra­tio ex­ceed­ed 617 per cent, Singh said.

Now it stands at 24.6 per cent.

“You will no doubt recog­nise a debt to GDP ra­tio of 24.6 per cent in fact places Guyana ahead of al­most any econ­o­my cer­tain­ly in this hemi­sphere and puts us in a po­si­tion where we ac­tu­al­ly have fair­ly sig­nif­i­cant head­room to bor­row,” Singh said.

Singh has seen first hand the change in eco­nom­ic for­tunes fac­ing the coun­try.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia in an ex­clu­sive in­ter­view at the bal­cony of the Mar­riott Ho­tel in Guyana, Singh said the goal is to en­sure that Guyana nev­er re­turns to the eco­nom­ic po­si­tion it once had been in.

“I wouldn’t pre­tend to say that this is an easy chal­lenge to be nav­i­gat­ing but we are con­fronting it.

“That is why we val­ue al­so com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the pop­u­la­tion mak­ing sure that peo­ple un­der­stand what we are do­ing, mak­ing sure that peo­ple un­der­stand the di­rec­tion in which we are go­ing. Mak­ing sure that peo­ple un­der­stand how their own well-be­ing is im­prov­ing,” Singh said.

“And what they need to do to po­si­tion them­selves to take ad­van­tage of the re­mark­able and ex­cit­ing sto­ry that is Guyana of the fu­ture,” Singh said.

Based on cur­rent pro­jec­tions Guyana’s sov­er­eign wealth fund, the Nat­ur­al Re­sources Fund, is ex­pect­ed to have a bal­ance of US$5.4 bil­lion by the end of 2026.

“The vol­ume of mon­ey that is com­ing is still rel­a­tive­ly mod­est rel­a­tive to the needs of the coun­try, so I am al­ways very cau­tious about cre­at­ing this im­pres­sion that you are talk­ing about vast vol­umes of mon­ey that are com­ing in. That is not the case there are still very im­por­tant fis­cal choic­es that have to be made bal­anc­ing com­pet­ing de­mands,” Singh said.

“We are in a bet­ter fis­cal po­si­tion now than we were 10, 15, 20, cer­tain­ly 30 years ago, we are in a bet­ter fis­cal po­si­tion we don’t have the same tight­ness of fis­cal con­straints as many oth­er ju­ris­dic­tions do but we still have a very re­al fis­cal con­straint and we have to make sure that we man­age the lim­it­ed fis­cal re­sources that we have in a pru­dent man­ner to lay the foun­da­tion for long term well-be­ing and not to com­pro­mise long term well be­ing,” Singh said.

Singh be­lieves the cur­rent Dr Mo­hamed Ir­faan Ali ad­min­is­tra­tion is up to the chal­lenge.

“It is my priv­i­lege to serve the peo­ple of Guyana as their Min­is­ter of Fi­nance at this time but I pride my­self too as part of a gov­ern­ment, led by the pres­i­dent, that is very well seized of the need for re­spon­si­ble gov­ern­ment at this point in time per­haps more so than at any oth­er point in time in Guyana’s his­to­ry,” he said.

Singh said Guyana in­tends to learn from the mis­takes made by oth­ers.

“The world is not short of ex­am­ples of ju­ris­dic­tions that have fall­en in­to the well-known cir­cum­stances of over-de­pen­dence on a par­tic­u­lar eco­nom­ic sec­tor and so we place the high­est lev­el of im­por­tance on en­sur­ing that we achieve strong non-oil eco­nom­ic growth and that we do the things nec­es­sary to­day to con­tin­ue to have strong non-oil eco­nom­ic growth go­ing for­ward,” Singh said.

As such he said will en­sure the growth of its non-en­er­gy sec­tors.

Guyana’s 11.5 per cent in non-oil eco­nom­ic growth in 2022, Singh said.

Re­al eco­nom­ic growth in the non-oil econ­o­my is ex­pect­ed to be 7.9 per cent for this year.

Singh said that re­al eco­nom­ic growth in the non-oil econ­o­my in pro­ject­ed to be “solid­ly in ex­cess of five per cent in the medi­um term.”