Introduction
This week’s column continues my evaluation of what I had earlier labelled: “a non-exhaustive list of the top-10 economic challenges”, which the Government of Guyana (GoG) will have to confront with First Oil due in 2020. Three of these challenges were briefly addressed last week namely, the Dutch Disease, the Resource Curse/Paradox of Plenty, and the Governance Curse. Today’s column addresses a further three top-10 challenges. Those are: Absorptive capacity, the Enclave Economy and Implementation Lags. Because of space constraints, I plan to discuss three more challenges from the remaining four items on this list, in next week’s column.
Challenge: Absorptive Capacity
As I had posited earlier in the evaluation of this challenge, I believe that, intuitively, most readers acknowledge severe constraints, bottlenecks, and impediments, constrain both the capacity and flexibility of Guyana’s economy, in circumstances where expansionary spending is occurring. Indeed, this phenomenon had long been acknowledged in the field of business management, where the notion of absorptive capacity was originally developed. It was noted that, for a firm/ business its ability to acquire, assimilate, transform and commercially exploit, knowledge/information that are external to it defines its absorptive capacity.
