Addressing the distorted reality

By: JC BHAGWANDIN, MSc

Mr Rawle Lucas, a fellow senior columnist and a practicing academician made direct reference to an article carried under this column on September 1, 2019, which was published in the Guyana Chronicle on September 22, 2019.

The writer sought to discredit the work of this analyst but has failed miserably in so doing. Before I attempt to defend my work by presenting my rebuttal to him, I wish to state that I have been a follower of Mr Lucas’ work since about seventeen years ago, and that I have great respect for a professional of his calibre.

Having said that, it is the inherent nature of academicians to respectfully disagree, debate and critique the work of each other, and therefore, this article should be viewed as nothing other than a healthy piece of academic debate grounded in objectivity, scholarly arguments and mutual respect. These public discourses and debates are also healthy and serves a crucial role as nationalists by way of educating, and keeping the nation informed in current affairs.

Turning now to my rebuttal, I must admit, firstly, that Mr Lucas did indeed observe an oversight on my part, wherein the data from the Bank of Guyana report that was used in the referenced article was inadvertently labelled as real GDP instead of nominal GDP. It was not necessarily an error of material effect; however, nor was it any deliberate attempt to mislead, as suggested by Mr Lucas.

If one were to examine in detail, following the methodology I used to present the comparison, one would observe that it tells virtually the same story. He further went on to highlight that I presented fourteen sectors instead of four by international standards.

Now, these are very insignificant observations by Mr Lucas and it all depends on the contextual nature of the analysis, which he failed to acknowledge. Mr Lucas, in fact, knows that there are the major economic sectors and then there are the subsectors that make up the major ones— for example, one major sector is Agriculture, Forestry & Fishing, which constitutes sugar as a subsector, rice, timber, livestock, fishing, other crops etc.

I therefore wish not to devote too much energy into rebutting the inconsequential elements of Mr Lucas’ piece of literature aimed at challenging my work. The viewpoints expressed therein were duly noted to the extent that, in summary, the article was a thousand words long of which only 100 words or 10 % were of substance, albeit weak.

To that end, my conclusion is such that I am deeply taken aback and disappointed that Mr Lucas did not lend any degree of rigor and depth in his analysis. Thus, overall, the article lacks sufficient depth and scholarly objectivity.

The underlying reason for the aforementioned conclusive inference is premised upon the fact that in all his weekly writings, he did not offer a comprehensive analysis contrary to the work done by this columnist where I have conducted a series of articles dedicated towards presenting a comprehensive analysis on the performance of the economy, and he has instead opted to choose one of the articles in isolation of all the others, and this therefore renders his critique unmeritorious and void of deep credibility.

To this end, I have written fourteen articles within the period March 2019 to date under this column – in which more detailed analyses were presented of other key macroeconomic variables and not just GDP— such as Balance of Payment, exchange rates, Bank of Guyana Reserves, Government expenditure and Public Debt etc. As such, it was incredibly ingenious of him to select a single article out of this entire series and attempt to present what I refer to as an intelligible piece of superficial analysis.

Unfortunately, I have reached the word limit for today’s article and therefore, I shall deal with the core substance of my rebuttal in next week’s column.

In so doing, I shall endeavour to continue this discussion wherein I will present the findings of some fresh analyses of the table that constitutes real GDP which was referenced together with an analysis of other macroeconomic variables as alluded to earlier, for the sake of this debate.