Promoting investment
EDITORIAL
Economic development manifests itself primarily in new investment. This will usually provide jobs, increase the gross domestic product, and create another ripple in the pond. If the GEC deal is concluded and the new GEC provides a reliable electricity supply, if we can improve and upgrade more of our roads and other transportation infrastructure (ferries, bridges), with our wonderful climate and available resources there is no good reason in principle why Guyana should not attract more investment, with the obvious exception of political instability. It is widely agreed that Go-Invest so far has failed to attract much investment. Various reasons have been put forward to explain this-ministerial and bureaucratic stifling of the agency, the bottleneck created by the incompetent Lands and Surveys Department, delays in dealing with investors and so on. There has recently been some reshuffling of the board of directors. Here is an idea the new board might wish to consider. Instead of waiting for investors to approach the agency the agency should prepare and package projects for new businesses and then try to sell them to investors, local and foreign. This has, of course, been done elsewhere. Ideally, it can be done with established industrial estates that offer ready made land with a power supply and other amenities and even factory buildings. But even without that, the agency could surely develop on paper a lot of potentially viable products, identify land, iron out other bottlenecks and then take a complete package to an investor. To achieve this the agency would need experienced and effective staff. Funding could surely be found to facilitate the employment of three or four high level investment promotion officers whose jobs would be to carry out feasibility studies of various industries and then market them to businessmen under the guidance of the manager. This is the kind of useful facilitating role the State can play in encouraging new investment. The deal with local businessmen for the new GAC has already shown the possibilities. Several experienced businessmen have got involved and made substantial investments. The State must create many more openings like this, not only by means of the privatisation route (one hopes local businesssmen will move in to acquire several of the businesses now on offer) but by identifying interesting and viable business projects, preferably using local raw materials, and then offering those to entrepreneurs. In some countries the State has gone as far as to start businesses in areas it considers important and then look for buyers for these businesses. The new Go-Invest board should give some consideration to the aggressive promotion of investment in this manner. 
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