OPINION: APNU-AFC stuck in dead-beat economics

Last Updated on Wednesday, 7 February 2024, 16:52 by Denis Chabrol

By Dr Randy Persaud, Professor Economics

Dr. Gary Best is the new intellectual voice of the languishing APNU-AFC. This is not good, because this same Dr. Best, to the best of my knowledge, has never published a refereed paper on economic development, and certainly not on macro-economics. If he has, he should share it. The closest the new economic guru of the APNU has come to credible commentary is his reference to Dudley Seers, a development economist. But even here there is sad news, unbelievably sad news for Best.

Thinking that he must have struck intellectual gold dust, Dr. Best quotes Professor Seers who had argued that a “plan which conveys no targets for reducing poverty, unemployment and inequality can hardly be considered a development plan” (Seers, quoted in Best, Dem. Waves 2/6/2024). Well, one must wonder where Gary Best has been because Budget 2024, along with the Estimates, consists of several volumes not only of “targets for reducing poverty,” but also of the instruments by which those targets will be measures and assessed.

I doubt Gary Best has ever read Seers’ work in detail. In his 1969 The Meaning of Development, Prof. Seers emphasized the point that while income level in general is important, how that income is spent within the family (and especially poor families) is of the greatest importance. In his ‘basic needs approach’ Seers is clear that food security is of utmost importance. This is not good news for Gary Best because Guyana is reported to have the second lowest malnutrition rate in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The 2023 FAO report on the Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition in Latin America and the Caribbean, “highlighted Guyana as being one of the countries in South America with the lowest prevalence of undernourishment” (Stabroek News, 11/27/2023).

I can tell you also, that food insecurity is worse for poor people even in the United States, when compared to Guyana. Data for 2022 show that 44,000,000 people in the United States are food insecure.

Gary Best probably did not know about Prof. Seers’ focus on food, nor is he aware of Guyana’s stellar accomplishment in food security, and especially in beating back malnutrition.

Professor Seers’ second indicator for assessing a development plan concerns jobs. He was clear that jobless growth cannot rightly be said to contribute to development. Everyone in Guyana knows that the rate of economic growth is so astounding that it is extremely difficult to find workers. The employment market has become so liquid that some workers leave their jobs and find another with higher wages within hours. But what is worse for Gary Best is that Prof. Seers is clear that employment must be broadly defined “to include studying, working on a family farm, or keeping house” (seers, 1969, 4).

If you think it can’t get worse for Gary Best, you are wrong. An entire generation of scholars and practitioners have recognized only one side of the growth-development debate, namely that economic growth does not necessarily equate to development. That was the standard narrative from the late 1950s (see Paul Baran), right through to the late 1980s. You see, Professor Seers clearly stated that there can be no improvement in the areas of poverty, unemployment, or inequality if there is no growth. In other words, no economic growth, no economic development. Thus, unfortunately for Gary Best, the same Professor Seers he quotes clearly noted that there could be no improvement in poverty, unemployment, and inequality, without economic growth. Had Gary Best read Dudley Seers, he could not have made those wild and inflammatory comments about growth and development.

Let me note that Dudley Seers was emphatic that no progress could be made with falling per capita income. Gary Best is oblivious to this.

It gets worse when it comes to the problem of inequality. Seers argued that inequality distorts the “personalities” of both high and low-income folks. Accordingly, inequality needs broader measures than income and wealth. “Trivial differences in accent, language, dress, customs, etc., can acquire an absurd importance and contempt is engendered for those who lack social graces, especially country dwellers” (Seers, 1969). In other words, inequality is embedded in development plans with urban biases.

Budget 2024 answers the last problem with hundreds of billions of investment dollars in both infrastructure and direct human development in the rural and hinterland areas of Guyana. Note that the separation between infrastructural and human development is a false binary. Hospitals and schools are simultaneously capital and human development. This devolvement of development is one of the greatest accomplishments in Budget 2024 and in previous PPP budgets.

I have no doubt that Professor Dudley Seers would have found much to praise in this year’s budget. I can say that because I studied his work carefully. I wish Gary Best and the people at APNU-AFC had done the same.

Dr. Randy Persaud is Adviser, International Affairs, Office of the President