Opinion
Could Guyana escape the natural resource curse? Part 3
The second part in this series addressed the question of how much money Guyana will likely receive. It is generally known today that the Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) is quite favourable toward ExxonMobil. We tried to understand this within the context of the Anglo-American corporate governance framework, which sees a corporation as having the sole…
Had Guyana got the lower end of a reasonable contract, we would have been much better off
You found out that your backyard has gold. Someone comes along and tells you he can dig up your gold. So you sign a contract with him that stipulates you are only entitled to 10 percent of your own gold. The gold digger finds 10,000 bars of gold, therefore according to the provisions of the…
Exxon should pay US$1B up front to Guyana, energy expert says
With billions already gained on the stock market from its oil find here, ExxonMobil and its partners can “more than afford” to pay Guyana US$1 billion instead of the US$18 million received as a signing bonus, according to energy expert Dr Vincent Adams, who also strongly believes that the government should go back to the…
Exxon should pay US$1B up front to Guyana, energy expert says
With billions already gained on the stock market from its oil find here, ExxonMobil and its partners can “more than afford” to pay Guyana US$1 billion instead of the US$18 million received as a signing bonus, according to energy expert Dr Vincent Adams, who also strongly believes that the government should go back to the…
There is no sharing in Exxon’s Production Sharing Agreement
If one adds the collective losses from contracts that were mismanaged; investments that fell through, like the glass factory under Burnham and the Skeldon Factory under Jagdeo as well as the Marriott; if you also consider all that was given in bailouts and loans to agencies that had to be written off; those losses will…
The oil find in Guyana is huge
We don’t need to hear about the personal sacrifices of politicians during past political campaigns or the hardships of being a leader, especially when such inflated speech is used as a means to defend the worst contract ever agreed upon, if opportunity losses to Guyana are computed on a per capita basis in the Production…
IDB did not help draft Petroleum Bill
A recent article in the Stabroek News ‘No plans to revisit Exxon deal’ (Jan 26) suggests that the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) was involved in the drafting of the Petroleum Commission Bill: “…the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), International Monetary Fund and the Commonwealth had helped with the drafting of the proposed legislation and stakeholders consulted…
Could Guyana escape the natural resource curse? Part 2: The role of corporate governance
The previous essay established the developmental context under which we address the essential question of this series: could Guyana escape the natural resource curse? The best measure we have of development is perhaps the Human Development Index (HDI) and its iterations such as the Gender Development Index and inequality-adjusted HDI. At a minimum, escaping the…
What is being gained from ExxonMobil’s investment?
Minister Trotman is reported (18th Jan) as stoutly defending ExxonMobil’s investment here. He says that Guyana should focus on what has been gained. Like what? The 2% royalty? The Falkland Islands have negotiated 9%. This tiny territory of 4,000 people will get 4.5 times as much as Guyana on every barrel of oil. Tarron Khemraj…
Could Guyana escape the natural resource curse? Part 1
By now many Guyanese are pondering the important concept known as the natural resource curse. Government ministers, high-paid government consultants and some news outlets have been talking about it since the discovery of high-quality crude oil in Guyana’s offshore waters. As early as 1995, the concept was first observed statistically by development economists and researchers…