Business focus
A new year has begun and many businesses are getting in stride with implementation of the plans that they would have developed for execution in the unfolding operating period. For the well organized and adequately resourced, production plans are already set and might even be in progress. Indeed, this would be particularly true for those companies that use a fiscal year and not a calendar year to measure their output and performance, since they would have started their new business year in 2013. Those businesses should be in second gear by now. This article attempts to paint a picture of what these and other businesses would have seen in the Guyana economy to lead them down their chosen path of economic focus and business strategy. What should emerge, therefore, is an indication of the sectors and industries that hold promise for well-managed investments. It should also be possible to see which sectors and industries harbour significant risk for current and future investment. Perhaps, most significant would be the realization that Guyana, while showing strong indications of an efficiency-driven economy, remains essentially a factor-driven economy at heart. This particular factor would be examined in the next article. The focus of this article will remain on the performance of the economy over the past seven years.
Structure of the economy
The discussion starts with an identification and evaluation of the structure of the economy. Guyana continues to present the classification of its national accounts in accordance with the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC) method. Consequently, the broad range of economic activities is subdivided into agriculture, manufacturing, mining and services. In addition to rice, sugar and other crops, agriculture accommodates three other industries. These are forestry, fishing and livestock. Mining harbours the bauxite, gold, diamond, manganese, sand and stone industries. The manufacturing sector does not claim any special industries even though it interacts with forestry for its wood products, agriculture for its meats, fruits and vegetables and the distributive industry for its acquisition of capital equipment, raw materials and other intermediate goods. Services consist of every other industry in Guyana. It therefore has the largest number of industries which is part of the reason that it accounts for the largest share of output in the Guyana economy. It is on the basis of the preceding structural classification of economic activities that the direction and trends in the economy are being assessed.
Share of output and income
Every economic actor does not look at the data with the same critical view. Yet, those who enter the market seem driven by some knowledge of opportunity. One is clearly the size of the market. Others are the amount of money to be had from the market. In order of size, the Guyana economy is dominated by the services sector which, from 2006 to 2012 accounted for
