Guyana is condemned to move two steps forward and one step backward

the depth of inequality during the PPP term.

While available data from Indepen-dence to now suggest a falling poverty rate and declining inequality, casual observation contradicts this view. Massive and widespread corruption during the last five decades enriches a few ‒ via government contacts for construction works and drugs (medicines) and massive fraud at customs, for example ‒ and impoverishes the majority, regardless of race. It is grand and state corruption, which benefits the few, rather than petty corruption, which suffers and impoverishes the majority, that harms growth and human development. While petty corruption greases the wheels that turn the economic engine, grand and state corruption wreck the economic apparatus. Is it time for the country to legalize corruption ‒ to make it legal to give a bribe but illegal to take a bribe but with a heavy penalty ‒ and to go after the upper 20 per cent of the population to ensure that it submits an annual tax return.

Frankly, the just-ended PPP government from 19922015 was arguably more corrupt than the PNC government from 1964-1992. Yet the PPP was able to deliver a higher rate of growth. Luck was certainly only its side, but this was also true of the last PNC government. Unfortunately, the latter frittered away the enormous goodwill of the ABC countries and embarked upon radical and corrosive foreign policies and depressive domestic policies. For example, it taxed and transferred a huge share of the surplus of the rice industry to the public coffers.

Yours faithfully, Ramesh Gampat