The economic case for more capacity is based on non-existing data: this policy will only drag us back to the dark ages
In hardly any of the coverage of plans for a larger runway or a new airport was the underlying assumption challenged: that building more boarding gates is good for business. But since 2000 business and holiday flights by residents of Guyana have fallen: a rate far beyond the general impact of the world recession. But, at vast public and private expense, at the cost of the people, the government is trying to build a larger runway.
So much for business. The great majority of flights are in fact used for leisure, overwhelmingly by people in the top social class. The result is not an economic boon for Guyana but a loss. Planes are tubes through which money is sucked out of the country. The more flights there are, the more we lose. That's assuming that anyone wants to take them.
For even leisure flights are now falling far short of the forecasts that the government has made. Could it be because the underlying growth in demand is grinding to a halt?
The old forecasts are quietly buried in the hope that nobody notices that projected demand is collapsing. I suspect the new forecasts are also wildly inflated, but the plans of so many powerful people are riding on the government's false assumptions that it cannot afford to make a full revision of the nonsense it has published in the past.
The PPP forecasts are treated as gospel, and the government demands only that we build, build, build.
The aviation policy framework the government published was written as if the industry was still in its take-off phase. The official purpose of the new airport is "to establish Guyana’s position as a important aviation hub". Why?
There is a real possibility that if parliament approves any of the extravagant schemes put before it, Guyana will be building a ghost airport for ghost planes. Already, in another transport sector – road traffic – the quality and durability of the newly built roads seems to be peaking much earlier than would be expected from the money spent on them. Perhaps one day Guyana will be littered with schemes like Spain's Ciudad Real airport and its 4,000m international runway, upon which, since April 2012, only birds have alighted. Or the twin towers of Benidorm's In Tempo, Europe's tallest residential building, which was supposed to absorb a booming tourist industry but which remains unfinished and empty. "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert ..."
Just as the forecasts for the growth in air traffic have proved false, so have the claims for the economic benefits it delivers. The airport lobbyists – and the government – maintain that greater connectivity stimulates economic growth. But a study by the consultancy CE Delft shows that in developing countries there is a weak correlation between connectivity and growth but no evidence of causation: economic growth could be causing the extra flights, rather than the other way round. In prosperous parts of the rich nations, even the correlation seems absent.
The evidence that increased air traffic boosts net jobs also seems to be missing. The government's primary role in transport planning appears to be to deceive us.
Every time the government supports a building project, it helps to stifle its competitors. When it deregulates polluting industries, or cuts the tax foreign companies must pay, or tries to drive the expansion of aviation regardless of demand, it helps to lock in destructive borrowing repayments which would otherwise be better spent on more sustainable jobs. If the PPP stays in office long enough, we'll eventually revert to using only donkey carts.
Progress here is measured not by creativity or improvement, but by the speed at which we break up and sell Guyana to party donors and foreigners, and our own quality of life. This is a government of the old, the dirty, the discredited, a mortal enemy of the people it claims to celebrate.
