Delayed release
The preliminary 2012 census report is out but it does not provide data on employment and the labour force in general. At the time of the release of the preliminary report Guyanese were told that they would have to wait another year to receive official word on what the employment, workforce numbers and their trends were like. This is especially true about private sector employment data since employment data along with compensation about the public sector is published annually by the Bureau of Statistics of Guyana (BOS). The delayed release of employment numbers could hardly be good news for any serious private investor who needs the numbers to understand the labour market, and to develop good hiring strategies and compensation packages for potential new hires. But data research undertaken by the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) indicates that government has been working with numbers that it feels confident about. The results of the census might just contradict what it has been projecting about employment.
The WTTC reported that in 2013, the tourism sector in Guyana directly employed 3.3 per cent or 8,000 of the total number of persons who were employed in the country. It also reported that a total of 8 per cent or 19,000 persons were directly or indirectly connected to the tourism industry. Crunching the two sets of numbers suggests that the number of persons that had jobs in Guyana in 2013 ranged between 237,000 to 243,000. These bald numbers say nothing about part-time or casual labour and leave one to think that they were all full-time workers. This is an assumption that is necessary in this article. Along with the data provided by the (BOS), it is possible to allocate the employment numbers between the private and public sectors and to make comparisons of employment and wages between the two sectors of the economy. This article bases its opinions and conclusions on the
