The Ratio and the Revenue

Guyana carries the lowest public debt ratio in the Caribbean. The Inter-American Development Bank’s Caribbean Economics Quarterly, issued in July, puts total debt at 28.6 per cent of GDP in 2025, up from 24.3 per cent in 2024, and forecasts 29.2 per cent for 2026. The IMF’s general government gross debt series gives the same three figures to the decimal. Every other economy in the Caribbean Debt Tracker sits above the 60 per cent regional benchmark. Guyana is the only one below it, and it is below by more than thirty points. The report’s verdict is that overall debt levels continue to be highly sustainable, and it has good grounds for saying so. Multilateral creditors hold 66.2 per cent of the external portfolio, which is concessional money on long maturities. Interest payments as a share of revenue have fallen from an average near 7 per cent in the five years before oil to about 5 per cent in the seven years since. Real GDP grew 43.8 per cent in 2024 and is forecast to grow 16.2 per cent in 2026. Set against that, a debt stock of 29 per cent of GDP is not what anyone would call a burden.

Then there is the other ratio, printed in the same table. Central government debt measured against government revenue was 151 per cent in 2024. It is estimated at 154 per cent for 2025 and forecast at 181.9 per cent for 2026. That is a rise of nearly thirty points in a single year, in a country whose debt-to-GDP ratio moves by less than one point over the same span. The arithmetic behind it is not mysterious. General government revenue is forecast to fall from 19 per cent of GDP in 2025 to 16 per cent in 2026 while the debt stock rises. GDP is expanding faster than the state’s capacity to tax it, and oil profit withdrawals, which are non-tax revenue, arrive in a lumpier pattern than tax receipts do. A ratio with GDP underneath it will keep looking comfortable for as long as the oil sector keeps growing. A ratio with revenue underneath it asks a different question, which is how much of what the government actually collects is already committed. Debt is not serviced out of GDP. It is serviced out of receipts.

The oil position cuts both ways, and that is the part most easily missed. Guyana became a net oil exporter in 2019. It still produces 90 per cent of its energy from imported oil. A higher world price lifts the revenue side of the budget and raises the cost of electricity and fuel in the same year, for the same government. The answer so far has been to hold the line on prices. The 2026 Budget promised a zero rate of tax on fuel. A new universal cash grant of US$500 has been introduced. Electricity subsidies continue. Each is a defensible response to an import shock, and together they mean the government is expected to run a larger primary deficit than it budgeted for. The primary balance has been in deficit every year since 2019. It was 6.9 per cent of GDP in 2024, an estimated 5.0 per cent in 2025, and a forecast 5.9 per cent in 2026. The economy with the region’s lowest debt ratio has not run a primary surplus in seven years.

None of this makes Guyana fragile, and the report does not claim it does. Withdrawal rules cap what the government may take from oil profits held in the Natural Resource Fund in any year. The debt portfolio is concessional, the debt service ratio is low, and growth is high. Those four things are why the Bank expects macro-fiscal risks to stay contained, and they are real. Two figures deserve watching anyway. Total reserves covered one month of imports in each of 2022, 2023 and 2024, which is thin for an economy that buys its energy abroad. And debt against revenue is heading for 182 per cent. The first is a question about buffers and the second is a question about capacity, and neither appears in the number most often quoted about Guyana. The Caribbean Debt Tracker carries Guyana at 29.2 per cent of GDP for 2026, the same figure the IMF and the Bank publish. It has never carried a primary balance for Guyana. This report supplies one, and it is a deficit.