PPP/C General Secretary, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo recently highlighted the latest International Monetary Fund (IMF) report on Guyana which has once again commended his administration’s prudent management of the nation’s debt. He said this clearly vindicates the criticisms that surged following the last disclosure by Minister of Finance, Dr Ashni Singh of Guyana’s debt nearly meeting US$6 billion.
Jagdeo underscored the IMF’s positive assessment by highlighting a key line from the Fund’s debt sustainability analysis (DSA). He quoted, “Total public debt has fallen considerably since 2020 …” To this end he said, “so that sentence there would answer all the critics.”
The Vice President argued that the IMF analysis directly counters claims from opposition figures and other critics who have accused the government of burdening future generations with unsustainable debt.
“We have pointed out we have some of the lowest debt-to-GDP ratios in the world and also…we’re using just a fraction of our revenue to service that debt unlike the past government,” Jagdeo asserted.
In 2023, the total stock of the government’s public and publicly guaranteed (PPG) debt rose by 23.4 percent to US$4.509 billion. This increase was driven by a 31.2 percent rise in domestic bonded debt, which reached US$2.733 billion, and a 13 percent growth in external debt, totaling US$1.775 billion. By the end of 2024, Guyana’s total PPG debt climbed further to US$5.993 billion. External PPG debt stood at US$2.239 billion, while domestic PPG debt increased to US$3.754 billion.
The IMF, in its recently published country report on Guyana, noted that gross public debt remains low and that vulnerabilities to large shocks are mitigated by “very large buffers”, including the sizeable savings in the country’s Natural Resource Fund (NRF).
“Applying judgement to account for ongoing structural transformations of the economy, the assessment of the risk of overall and external debt distress has been upgraded to low from moderate in previous DSAs,” IMF said.
According to the IMF, total gross public debt is projected to rise modestly from 24% of GDP in 2024 to about 28% by 2026. However, it was stated that this is still well within the statutory debt ceiling, which was expanded by the government last year.