Guyana’s Senior Minister in the Office of the President with responsibility for Finance, Dr. Ashni Singh, says the country’s fiscal position, particularly its debt metrics and growing oil savings, has placed it in a category few nations can match, making it “the envy of nations around the world.”
Speaking on the Starting Point Podcast recently, Singh argued that Guyana’s public finance story is not just about earning oil revenue, but about what the country has done with it, pairing strong fiscal management with a rules-based sovereign wealth fund and building buffers that give policymakers room to plan long-term.
Singh traced the foundation of that narrative back to the early 1990s, when Guyana was, in his words, “a completely bankrupt country,” with a debt burden that exceeded 600% of GDP, meaning the country owed more than six times the size of the economy.
He said successive People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) Administrations worked to restore solvency through “prudent, responsible, and sound fiscal management.”
By the end of 2014, Singh said Guyana had reduced its debt-to-GDP ratio from over 600% to 37% and he stressed the point repeatedly: it was achieved “without a drop of oil being produced and without a drop of oil revenue being earned.” For him, that historic turnaround is proof of capacity and intent: that disciplined debt management is not new, but embedded.
Fast forward to the present, Singh said the debt-to-GDP ratio is now around 24%, which he described as “one of the lowest in the world” and among the lowest in the Western Hemisphere.
That positioning, he suggested, is rare even before considering what sits behind it: a sovereign wealth buffer that continues to expand as production and receipts grow.
Singh then connected the “envy” line directly to the country’s savings posture. He said Guyana has accumulated enough resources in the Natural Resource Fund (NRF) to pay off the country’s entire external debt “and still have some change left back,” if the government chose to do so.
“That alone makes Guyana the envy of nations around the world,” he said, because few countries can credibly claim both low debt and the savings capacity to eliminate external obligations at will.
