The Windfall and the Waiting

Guyana is the fastest-growing economy on earth, transformed by an offshore oil boom of historic scale. Six years in, the defining question is no longer whether the country is rich, but whether the wealth is reaching its people.

Along the East Bank of the Demerara River, past the hotels rising out of former cane fields and the queues of trucks bound for the shore bases, the scale of what has happened to Guyana becomes difficult to overstate. In 2019 this was one of the poorest countries in South America, an economy of sugar, rice, gold and bauxite worth a little over five billion dollars. Today, measured by the pace of its growth, it is the fastest-expanding economy on earth.

The engine of that change sits about 190 kilometres offshore, in a deepwater concession called the Stabroek Block operated by ExxonMobil with Hess and China's CNOOC. Since the first barrel was lifted in December 2019, production has climbed from roughly 75,000 barrels a day to around 900,000, and the government projects it will pass 1.3 million within a few years. For a nation of some 800,000 people, the arithmetic is staggering. It is also the source of the central question this newspaper begins its life by asking: whether a windfall of this size can be turned into lasting prosperity, or whether Guyana joins the long list of countries that struck oil and grew poorer for it.

A decade of numbers that break the chart

The clearest way to grasp the transformation is to look at the size of the economy itself. For most of the past decade Guyana's nominal output crept upward in the manner of a small agricultural state, from about 4.3 billion dollars in 2015 to 5.2 billion in 2019. Then oil arrived. Output more than doubled between 2021 and 2022, and by 2025 the economy was worth roughly 26 billion dollars, five times its pre-oil level. The International Monetary Fund recorded real growth of 43.6% in 2024, the highest of any economy it tracks, after an expansion of more than 60% in the first full year of production.

Growth of this order is not, on its own, a measure of national wellbeing. Nominal figures inflated by a single export can flatter a country while leaving most of its citizens where they were. The more demanding test is what the money is doing once it comes ashore, and for whom.

What the boom has meant for daily life

The evidence on ordinary lives is genuinely mixed, and honesty requires saying so. Public-sector wages have risen, a national programme has removed tuition at the University of Guyana, and the government has distributed cash transfers directly to households, including grants of 100,000 Guyana dollars per adult and payments tied to newborns and schoolchildren. Mortgage relief, part-time job schemes and subsidies on electricity and water have put money into pockets that were empty a decade ago. New roads, a bridge across the Demerara and a long-promised gas-to-shore project are under construction.

Yet the gains sit alongside strains that a rising average income conceals. The cost of living in Georgetown has climbed sharply, driven by rents and food prices in a capital suddenly full of oil workers and expatriate salaries. Households outside the boom's orbit, in the rural interior and among the Indigenous communities of the hinterland, report that prices reached them faster than wages did. Inequality, by most local accounts, has widened. A frequently cited estimate has placed the share of Guyanese living in poverty at more than half the population as the boom began, and while that baseline predates the largest transfers, it is a reminder of how far the country started behind.

How the wealth is being governed

Every petro-state eventually confronts the same problem: money arrives faster than the institutions built to manage it. Guyana's answer, at least on paper, is the Natural Resource Fund, a sovereign account established to hold the government's oil receipts and release them into the budget under a formula written into law. The fund held little more than a hundred million dollars in 2020. By 2025 its balance had grown to roughly 3.6 billion dollars, even as the government drew heavily on it to finance a national budget that reached about 1.38 trillion Guyana dollars.

The fund's design has drawn both credit and criticism. Supporters note that a rule-based mechanism is more than many resource economies managed at a comparable stage, and that withdrawals are reported and audited. Critics, including opposition figures and civil-society groups, argue that the 2021 rewrite of the fund's law concentrated too much discretion in the finance minister, weakened the independent oversight board, and allows so much of the inflow to be spent each year that little is genuinely being saved for the future. The debate is not academic. It is the difference between a fund that stabilises the country for a generation and one that functions as a second treasury drained in the political cycle.

The terms of the oil itself remain the most contested inheritance of all. The 2016 production-sharing agreement with the ExxonMobil group grants Guyana a royalty of 2% and a half share of profit oil after the companies recover their costs, with a cost-recovery ceiling that lets the operators reclaim up to three-quarters of production before profits are split. Independent analysts have argued the government captures a smaller share of the resource than it might have under a tougher contract, and a dispute over more than 200 million dollars in disputed expenses has run through the courts. Ministers counter that reopening the agreement would deter the investment now driving the boom, and that the priority is to spend well rather than to relitigate the past.

The test the next decade will set

Guyana has tried to write its own answer to the resource curse into policy. Its Low-Carbon Development Strategy pairs the oil economy with the sale of forest-carbon credits, and a landmark agreement is channelling hundreds of millions of dollars from the preservation of standing rainforest, a rare attempt to hedge a fossil-fuel windfall against the transition that will one day shrink it. Whether that ambition survives the gravitational pull of oil revenue is one of the more important experiments in development economics now under way anywhere.

The risks are the familiar ones. An exchange rate and a labour market bent around a single industry can hollow out farming and manufacturing, the classic Dutch disease. A young, English-speaking population is both an asset and a temptation to emigrate, and Guyana has long recorded one of the highest emigration rates in the hemisphere. And a border controversy with Venezuela over the Essequibo region, the very territory beneath which much of the oil lies, adds a geopolitical charge that no sovereign fund can insure against.

None of this settles the verdict, and it is too early to reach one. What can be said is that Guyana is being handed, in a single decade, a chance that most developing nations never receive: the capital to build schools, hospitals, power and institutions that would otherwise have taken generations to afford. The windfall is real. The waiting, for the roads to reach the villages, for the fund to be protected from the politics of the moment, for the growth to become something citizens can feel, is the harder part. The Caribbean Ledger begins its coverage of the region's defining economic story here, and intends to follow the money, patiently, all the way to shore.