‘Intense’ consultations with private sector as gov’t preps for Budget 2022 

Preparations for Budget 2022 is in full swing and according to the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ashni Singh, the government has held “intense” engagements with the private sector in this regard.

The Senior Minister, responding to questions posed by the News Room recently, revealed that the government has been “assiduously” working to refine the necessary proposals for the budget with several consultations held over the past few months.

Budget submissions, according to the minister, have already started rolling in from government agencies or “budget agencies” and those entities have also commenced refining their sectoral policies and articulated “strategic plans” for the upcoming fiscal year.

“We have also been engaging with various non-governmental agencies, the private sector and various groups within the private sector and the citizenry at large so there is a lot of direct engagement to get a sense of what their concerns are in a very intense way,” Minister Singh shared.

Preparation for successive budgets is seen as a continuous process and requires “a lot of groundwork” before the final product is made public, Dr Singh explained.

“Against that background, we have actually been working on budget 2022 for quite some time; preliminary work, macro-economic projects, getting a sense of the physical space, getting a sense of what some of the economic constraints are likely to be, refining and further elaborating our economic policies and our sectoral policies in particular and that has been happening for quite some time.”

And what can be expected in budget 2022, the Finance Minister said is the continuity of the policies outlined in the People’s Progressive Party Civic’s manifesto along with the “implementation and delivery of the commitments we have already given to Guyana.”

“We are a government that prides ourselves on policy continuation and we have never been a government that is erratic or haphazard in our policies so you are going to see a lot of policy continuity in the new budget,” he alluded.

This would be the second full budget prepared and presented by the government after taking office in August 2020. No official date has been announced but the News Room understands that it is slated to be presented in January.

The budget for 2021 was $383.1 billion.