Senior Minister in the Office of the President with responsibility for Finance Ashni Singh yesterday said that the 48% poverty rate reflected in the updated World Bank factsheet on Guyana, was arrived at using figures from 2019.
Singh made the statement in a video responding to Leader of the Opposition Aubrey Norton who, on Tuesday, hammered the government for the poverty rate and called for the utilization of money from the oil industry to tackle the issue.
The World Bank updated its factsheet on Guyana on October 6, 2022. It indicated that the poverty rate stood at 48% but failed to provide a date for the data compiled. Following the reports in the press and Norton’s comments, the World Bank has since further updated its factsheet to reflect a date and announced that Guyana has also been recategorized as upper-middle income.
“Poverty in Guyana, measured using the upper-middle income poverty line (US$5.50 per day in 2011 PPP [Purchasing Power Parity]) has dropped from close to 61 percent in 2006 to around 48 percent in 2019, but was still among the highest in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region,” the updated factsheet on the World Bank’s website stated.
The update was done on November 02 after likely complaints by the government.
The World Bank also said that Guyana’s re-categorization as upper middle income was done in 2015 and as such a poverty line of US$5.50 per day in 2011 PPP, appropriate for countries at this income classification is used to monitor poverty. Countries used in the regional comparison include Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. They were chosen based on the availability of comparable poverty data, as published by the LAC Equity Lab, and ranged from lower-middle income to high-income countries.
The adjustment by the World Bank will raise ongoing questions here about the quality of data being produced by international institutions.
In his video statement, Singh said that Norton sought to use the poverty statistics to paint Guyana in a particular manner and to besmirch the track record of the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) government. Singh said that Norton failed to determine the nature, background and source of the statistics along with the manner in which they were computed and should be interpreted.
“It would be of interest to the people of Guyana that the poverty statistics that were cited in that World Bank report and that Mr Norton used as the basis to try to criticize the People’s Progressive Party/Civic government, those poverty statistics, in fact, are statistics taken from 2019.
“…if we take the statistics at face value, all of Mr Norton’s comments about the state of Guyana as using his interpretation of those statistics, are in fact comments that would be applicable to the state of Guyana in 2019. Because the statistics that he’s citing in fact, are 2019 statistics. Indeed, had he been bothered to inquire about the date of these statistics, he might have been a little bit more measured in his comments because it’s widely known that in 2019 Guyana was in the throes of an APNU+AFC dictatorship refusing to recognize the results of a no-confidence motion legitimately passed in the Parliament in December 2018 bringing the economy to a complete standstill, grinding the country to a complete halt and descending us into economic crisis,” Singh lashed out.
Singh reminded that Norton was in fact part of the government back in 2019. He also said that the Opposition Leader was not bothered with verifying the data and sought to misrepresent the facts.
He said that the World Bank had updated its fact sheet and challenged Norton to reconsider his comments. He also said that there are a number of other relevant factors that need to be taken into account in analyzing the data presented by the World Bank.
He said that as a result of the country’s per capita income going up owing to economic growth, the reclassification as an upper-middle-income country now means that new variables are used when determining the poverty rate.
“One has to understand how those statistics are computed or the variables that influence them, how they’ve changed over time, the basis of measurement etc and this is yet another example of the quantitative or numerical… (it) is an arithmetic illiteracy of the APNU+AFC,” he said.
At his press conference, Norton said that despite lofty promises from the government and talks about development, the gap between the coast and hinterland is rapidly widening with very little being done to bridge it. He stated that the common trend, during Opposition outreaches, is persons complaining about not being able to put food on the table or meet their financial obligations.
Those comments were fuelled by the fact that the World Bank had said that “Poverty rates are highest in the sparsely populated interior or hinterland, where communities have limited access to economic opportunities, healthcare and public services.”
The World Bank has since removed that sentence. The financial institution has remained silent as to why it changed the data or why it initially failed to attach a date to the information presented.
