Aggressive Spending
In articulating the national competitive strategy, there is no doubt that a major focus of the administration was expanding the export activity of Guyana. The pursuit of this objective would be reflected in the actions taken by the administration to create opportunities for success. That success would show up in the growth in export volume and in a rebalancing of the share of revenues earned by traditional and non-traditional exports. Where Guyana is today by the numbers would not convince many that the market diversification efforts could be regarded as successful. While volume data is currently unavailable to this writer, the value of non-traditional exports in total exports is not impressive. In 2006, non-traditional exports accounted for seven percent of export revenues. The share was the same in 2010. Much more alarming, though, is that the share of export revenues from non-traditional exports is no greater than it was in 2001, even though there has been aggressive spending on improving Guyana’s competitiveness since 2006.
Positive Direction
To be fair, there has been some increase in exports of non-traditional products. A review of export statistics in the annual report of the
