Some of the barriers to the competiveness of Guyana’s exports on regional markets are the result of constraints that are internal to the economy, Canadian Professor Thomas McKaig told a media briefing in Georgetown earlier this week.
McKaig is a Canadian author with some 30 years of international business experience. He owns Thomas McKaig International Inc and is an adjunct professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario.
He is in Guyana on a Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)-funded mission to undertake a study of non-tariff barriers and their impact on trade and export. He stopped short of describing constraints like high electricity charges and transshipment costs associated with Georgetown’s badly silted harbour as “self-inflicted non-tariff barriers” but accepted that these amount to additional “production costs” which must be removed if locally produced goods are to more competitive on the regional market.
