In early January this year, Stabroek News reported on a Wall Street Journal/Heritage Foundation 2009 Index of Economic Freedom. That sparked the usual outrage from the government led by President Jagdeo, and supported by the usual letter writers including Ms Marissa Lowden, whose contributions have dried up since her departure from Dr Prem Misir’s office. For some reason, the Kaieteur News only recently carried a report on the same index.
The government reacted as it knows best – instinct over common sense and power over brain, again led by the champion driver, this time supported by the three doctors Ashni Singh, Prem Misir and Randy Persaud, and Marissa’s ghost. The fact that none of them recognised that the later report had no originality was bad enough. If they had, they would have had the upper hand and precious state resources could have been better used elsewhere. But lead letter writer Dr Randy Persaud in the Stabroek News of May 8 (‘Organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Economist are attempting to usurp the authority of the multilateral institutions’) combined a pedantic and political approach, concluding with a professorial pronouncement on the report’s perceived authors as well as its imagined “basic mistakes” which he claimed even a sixth grader would have recognised, even though he himself seemed unable to identify any. This cleverness backfired with several serious errors in his letter.
Here are some of those errors with elaborations inserted for Dr Persaud’s enlightenment.
1. The report was an international index, not a country report as suggested by Dr Persaud.
2. For this particular index, Heritage partners with the Wall Street Journal of the USA, not the Economist of the UK.
3. The index is available free online, with methodology and all. Therefore, it is inaccurate to state that there is no transparency in the index’s publication and that the index is a commercial venture.
4. The Economist might be an institution but it is not an organisation, nor does it publish a country report. The Economist is a weekly news magazine. Also, the Economist Intelligence Unit, a leading research and advisory firm, in addition to consulting, publishes quarterly Country Reports for subscribers.
5. The IMF and the World Bank, among other multilaterals, are endowed with authority to provide reliable economic data and analyses. In fact these institutions rely almost entirely on the “official” statistics published by governments, including Guyana’s. Perhaps Dr Persaud could be encouraged to tell Guyanese who endowed them with proprietary authority that others can usurp. Or why his President rejected the World Bank’s “authoritative” index and analysis in their 2009 ‘Doing Business’ series, which was less than complimentary about Guyana’s business climate.
6. The rankings, Dr Persaud claims, are not based on actual performances, but biased towards narrow ideological criteria. Again, if Dr Persaud would break ranks and tell the nation about the government’s actual performance on corruption, it then could be able to test how ideological or biased is the index’s Guyana’s percentage rating of 26.5 in ‘Freedom from Corruption.’ The cynic might argue that that score reflects a pro-government bias!
7. The organisations he identified (Heritage and Economist) have their roots in the Cold War era. The reality is that the Economist first appeared one hundred and three years before the Cold War began in 1946 and that it is the IMF and the World Bank which are rooted in the Cold War, formed in the US by the West, as their tools of economic colonization and control. (See Cheddi Jagan’s West on Trial.)
I once wrote in a response to another letter that I had never seen so many errors in a single letter. I now need to review that assessment. Other than the above, I share with Dr Persaud an ideological dislike for the conservative, pro-capitalist Heritage Foundation.