Since someone brought up the subject of economy and I'm through with my class work for the semester, I thought that I'd share what I've been learning in economic geography, which is basically economics that realizes that transactions don't take place on the head of a needle.

In addition to my studies I've been applying what I've learned to studying the Caribbean and Guyana in particular.

I've been working with the Theil Index, which is an index used to classify which units of a group contribute to the inequality amongst members of the group as a whole.


It utilizes a unit's share of population and income to assign a 'Theil number' to each unit. The most similar units cluster around the zero line. If a unit has a high income share and/or population share then it is considered highly ‘unequal’ and it is assigned a higher absolute value. High positive values mean that a unit has a high share of income relative to the rest (though it could still have a large population) and negative Theil values show that a unit has a very large population share and a proportionately smaller share of the income.




The first thing that I noted upon graphing my calculations is that Guyana is on the tail-end of the 'normal' or even 'equal' countries. That means that in terms of share of population and income that Guyana isn't doing nearly as bad as some of the bigger poor islands.

But every method of economic comparison has its shortcomings.

Here's the problem with the Theil index. You can only tell so much utilizing population and income. It says nothing about income distribution. It's also useless when you want to see how developed a country is. Though I've never personally been to Jamaica or the DR, I assume that the average poor person there has it slightly better in those places than in Guyana. The reason is that those countries' populations are much larger. There are things that a country can do with a much larger population base than otherwise. Public transportation is just one example.

I figured that I'd offer a comparative picture of Guyana based on data rather than anecdotal goings on. It helps to put things in perspective.

I walk away from this glad that we've got it better than more than a few places, though worse than every former British colony in the Caribbean.

It helps that some of the countries at the high end of the spectrum are our closest neighbors, namely Trinidad and Barbados. Sure we've got no oil or Beaches, but with better management and development we should be able to pull into somewhere in the middle of the pack. Surpassing Belize would be a good goal. Belize is a mainland state versus an island.

I got my data for my calculations from the CIA world factbook, they seem to update their vital stats fairly frequently.