As part of my continuing assessment of the 2012 National Budget I attempted two tasks in last week’s column. The first was to complete the ongoing discussion of the secular decline in public sector financial management over the past four decades. This was followed by a brief description of the categories of domestic debt, external debt and total debt as well as the overall balance of the Guyana public sector, to be used as an introduction to this week’s portrayal of the performances of these economic concepts during the 2000s.
The valley of debt
In my view the behaviour of the absolute values of Guyana’s domestic, external, and total public sector debt stock in the 2000s offers an insight into one of the Budget’s key aspects. That is, what it indicates for the economic outlook and challenges to medium term macroeconomic stability of the economy. As the data in Table 1 reveal, the stock of total national debt stood at $270 billion in 2000, and by the end of last year (2011), this had reached $370 billion, an increase of about 37 per cent. This has been quite a surprising increase during the 2000s coming as it did after the long struggles
