Colonial dependency, core-periphery, and capitalism: a case study of the Guyana economy

Abstract

This paper presents the economic development of Guyana, from several novel analytic technical perspectives. The development spans three dominant regimes in Guyana, starting just before its independence from Great Britain in 1966. The country has moved from a colonial type of development strategy to a modified socialist system and returned to a capitalist approach over the last 40 years. New paradigms such as information theory, game theory, convergence theory, and cross-border analysis have improved our insights into economic development through improvement of classical and neoclassical equilibrium models. However, rather than using the traditional equilibrium model, we will, through a rivalry hypothesis, examine patterns of behavior among Guyana's sectors and its external trading partners for the different regimes. We will also point out anomaly in the behavior of the service sector, unjustified inverted leader-follower relationship among trading partners, unheeded signaling of information from cross-border financial ratios and overlooked implications of non-convergence. We believe that the results of this case study will enhance our understanding of the development process.