Former GCCI Head wants less local content clamour, more push for private sector growth

President Irfaan Ali addressing the Local Content Policy forum earlier this year at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre. (Office of the President photo)

A former president of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) has said that the current preoccupation by Business Support Organizations (BSO) with the Local Content spinoffs that promise to derive from the country’s emerging oil & gas industry ought to be matched by a corresponding vigorous lobby for the creation of a domestic economic environment that helps facilitate broader substantive private sector growth.

In a comment on issues impeding the growth of the Guyana economy published in this issue of the Stabroek Business, Clinton Urling, a former Chamber President drops a broad hint that the preoccupation of the local private sector bodies with what they appear to anticipate as a huge economic windfall to be derived from local content spinoffs, may have created a blinkered perspective that could result in diminished focus on addressing the various constraints that impede the substantive growth of the private sector.