Dear Editor,
I wish to add to the discussion on Guyana’s transitioning to a higher level of human development as initiated by Professors Tarron Khemraj and Randy Persaud (SN 5/2/2025). Khemraj taught me at the University of Guyana, and we are friends.
The reaction to their letter included the usual rebuttal in the comments section. Some commentators presented alternative measures for understanding the status quo. Interestingly, some commentators took the view that Khemraj was now “roaring” a different tune. In my view, Khemraj would have carefully weighed his position, knowing fully well that it would create debate – hopefully healthy debate. Nothing in the letter, in my view, presented a partisan view. The authors simply used data from a credible organisation to start an important debate. We can always question the credibility of the numbers, but some institutions are more credible than others. I will use the very numbers provided by the Human Development Report (HDR).
The HDR was first published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1990 with the HDI and its concomitant ranking of countries a hallmark of the annual report. The theme for the 2025 report is “A matter of choice: People and possibilities in the age of AI”. The data in that 2025 report is based on data up to 2023. Over the years the report has gone through significant changes including moving the calculation of the HDI from an arithmetic mean to a geometric mean. This change reduced the impact that a large change in one of the three dimensions (income, health and education) would have on the index, as there was no longer perfect substitutability among the dimensions.
Guyana has made remarkable progress on the HDI. In 1990 Guyana’s HDI measure (not to be confused with the ranking) stood at 0.494 and moved to 0.776 in 2023. For the same period Barbados’ HDI measure moved from 0.730 to 0.811 – an understandably slower change. The 2025 HDR also provides data on the changes in HDI rankings for each country over the period 2015-2023. Guyana has the largest jump of any country, a jump of 33 places up the rankings.
However, there is one critical addition to the analysis of the HDI which must be considered. A novel feature of HDR reports is a measure of the difference between the income (GNI per Capita) ranking and the HDI ranking of a country. A positive value says that the welfare of a country is higher than what its income would otherwise dictate, and vice versa. I have often shown to my students how that measure works by looking at the case of Cuba. Cuba consistently records the highest positive jump of any country on the list. In the 2025 HDR, Cuba records a positive number of 30. Once again, the highest jump of any of the 193 countries on the HDI. What is concerning, however, is that Cuba jumped 47 places back in 2014, so its current difference is indicative of the declining welfare of the citizens of Cuba. On this measure, Guyana has the largest drop of any country on the latest HDI rankings. Guyana records a whopping negative difference of 54. This measure penalises countries with relatively high per capita incomes but with performances in education and health which are not commensurate with what the income dimension otherwise suggests relative to countries with similar incomes. In recognizing the imperfection of the HDI the UNDP has included this measure to provide greater context to the HDR ranking.
The theme of the 2025 Multi-dimensional Poverty Index (MPI) Report focused on poverty and climate hazards, and in keeping with the point about distribution made by my friend Dr Terence Yhip (SN 6/2/2026), the report notes, and I quote, “Poverty levels also show a considerable range within each country. For example, Guyana has a low incidence at 1.8 percent on average, but rates run from 0.1 to 23 percent depending on the region of the country”.
Guyana is transitioning but more analysis needs to be done to better understand the pace and distribution of said transition. Several HDRs do not have data for Guyana on important measures such as the poverty line and inequality (Gini Coefficient), so to properly understand what is happening will require a broader range of timely data.