The borders of Venezuela and Guyana on a world map. (Below the Sky/shutterstock)

Guyana’s open investment model contrasts with Venezuela’s mismanagement, showing how oil policy choices drive growth, stability, and geopolitical alignment.

Guyana’s Finance Minister Ashni Singh has presented his budget for 2026. The $7.5 billion budget is the country’s largest ever, focusing on economic expansion and infrastructure, long-term diversification of the economy away from oil, major investments in gas-to-energy projects, and support for the country’s Amerindian communities. 

Next door in Venezuela, home to the world’s largest known oil reserves, the economy remains deeply troubled. Basic staples remain in short supply, prices are high, and over the last decade, around 8 million people left the country due to economic and safety concerns. 

Guyana and Venezuela’s Diverging Oil Strategies 

Guyana and Venezuela are both oil-based economies. That said, their experiences could not be more different. Over more than two decades of socialist experimentation, Venezuela forced out most foreign energy companies (losing their expertise), nationalized their assets (as with ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips), grossly mismanaged the industry by replacing skilled workers and managers in the state-owned PDVSA with Chavista loyalists, and let corruption run rampant. As Caleb Jasso, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Research, observed, this left the oil sector in “significant disrepair, abandonment, and, in certain cases, it has been stripped entirely for parts.” 

Despite help from Chinese, Iranian, and Russian state-owned oil companies, which sent assistance to repair refineries and provided the use of shadow tankers to evade US sanctions, Venezuela’s oil industry failed to turn around. Venezuela’s oil production was estimated at around 1 million barrels per day (bpd) as of 2025, down from over 3 million bpd in the late 1990s. In comparison, Guyana produced close to 900,000 bpd in late 2025. 

Guyana chose a different path, offering an open investment environment to foreign energy companies, benefiting from their expertise, and providing better (though not perfect) transparency and disclosure than its neighbor. Although certain........

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