Introduction
Last week’s discussion on sugar in the economy focused on those long-run performance indicators, which would aid an evaluation of the viability of GuySuCo. To supplement those indicators, I draw attention today to one other useful long-run indicator of the forces operating on GuySuCo over the past two decades. That is, the revealed pattern of spending on its two main categories of inputs; namely: employment costs and materials and services.
At the start of the 1990s GuySuCo’s spending on materials and services exceeded its spending on employment. However, by the beginning of the 2000s, this relation was reversed. Over the past two decades, its expenditure on employment rose by more than eight-fold, while that on materials and services grew five-fold. For both categories taken together, expenditure grew more than six-fold. Most of this increase took place in the first half of the 1990s (they quadrupled for both categories).
The growth in expenditure during the second-half of the
