As crit­i­cal as the fis­cal mea­sures are in the 2025 na­tion­al Bud­get to day-to-day liv­ing, the need is for the ex­pert com­men­ta­tors, the news­pa­per ed­i­to­ri­als and oth­ers to go past the book­keep­ing ex­er­cise in the state­ment to fo­cus on the plans and pro­grammes to re­vive and ad­vance the econ­o­my.

Why? In an econ­o­my with straight­ened fi­nances and most of all hav­ing a lim­it­ed range of eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment mea­sures in place and func­tion­ing ef­fec­tive­ly, there will for­ev­er be con­tests about who should get what piece of the pie; and who should pay the price for such shar­ing.

We, there­fore, will fo­cus briefly on a cou­ple of the plans and pro­grammes list­ed in the 2025 Bud­get and its pre­de­ces­sor edi­tions, to iden­ti­fy and analyse the mea­sures put for­ward by the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance and the Gov­ern­ment to grow the econ­o­my. More­over, we sur­vey whether or not the plans and pro­grammes have been ad­vanc­ing or stuck in the rut of un­ful­filled promis­es and failed im­ple­men­ta­tion mea­sures.

Un­der the head­ings of in­fra­struc­ture up­grade, list­ed for at­ten­tion are plans for the en­er­gy sec­tor, man­u­fac­tur­ing, agri­cul­ture, ex­port pro­duc­tion made pos­si­ble through the Ex­im Bank and the sup­port­ing “en­abling sec­tor” for trade fa­cil­i­ta­tion, dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion and digi­ti­sa­tion, there is too, quite a list­ing of projects which are be­ing con­tem­plat­ed and in in­stances have be­gun to be ma­te­ri­alise.

The ques­tion then be­comes the fea­si­bil­i­ty of such projects and im­ple­men­ta­tion time­lines be­yond re­cur­ring promis­es of start-ups.

In the in­stance of the en­er­gy sec­tor, which Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley has iden­ti­fied as the main hope for re­vival, Drag­on Gas pro­duc­tion and pro­cess­ing and oth­er pro­posed en­er­gy re­lat­ed projects be­tween Trinidad and To­ba­go and Venezuela, are ab­solute­ly de­pen­dent on geo-po­lit­i­cal con­cerns and the ac­tions of the USA and are there­fore com­plete­ly out of our con­trol.

To his cred­it, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert is ab­solute­ly spot on in say­ing that T&T has an agree­ment which if and when op­er­a­tionalised can be of sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fit to this coun­try and its peo­ple. It can­not be rea­son­ably ex­pect­ed that T&T should do any­thing to jeop­ar­dise the agree­ment.

Where there is move­ment from plan­ning to pro­duc­tion is in the op­er­a­tions of the Ex­im Bank. Ac­cord­ing to Min­is­ter Im­bert, US$983 mil­lion has been dis­bursed to 183 man­u­fac­tur­ers (2021-2023) with an­nu­al sur­plus­es on those bor­row­ings reg­is­ter­ing US$100 mil­lion. The out­come has been a 17 per cent con­tri­bu­tion to the Gross Do­mes­tic Prod­uct by the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor.

How­ev­er, in the in­stances of agri­cul­ture and tourism, even mak­ing al­lowances for the dis­rup­tion of COVID-19 in the in­stance of the long tout­ed tourism sec­tor, there is lit­tle mean­ing­ful growth. One neg­a­tive re­sult has been the bal­loon­ing TT$7-plus bil­lion food im­port bill.

The Fi­nance Min­is­ter did out­line a mul­ti­tude of projects and in­ten­tions that “we plan to and have the in­ten­tion to, and are lay­ing the ground­work for,” but the fact is they re­main in the hope­ful stage of im­ple­men­ta­tion.

What the Fi­nance Min­is­ter did state pos­i­tive­ly is that in re­la­tion to the Gov­ern­ment’s plan to de­vel­op in­dus­tri­al parks as “the cor­ner­stone of our in­dus­tri­al strat­e­gy, there has been sig­nif­i­cant progress.”

The dif­fi­cul­ty with all of the plan­ning and fig­ur­ing is that over the 10-year pe­ri­od and 10 bud­gets since this Gov­ern­ment and Min­is­ter Im­bert have been in of­fice, Prime Min­is­ter Row­ley him­self has made it known that de­pen­dence will con­tin­ue to be on the en­er­gy sec­tor.