Gopeesingh: Govt pumps 20 per cent of GDP into education

Minister of Education, Dr Tim Gopeesingh has said T&T spends more of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on education than many other developed countries. “We have contributed the largest per cent of our GDP in the past three budgets towards education for both my Ministry and the Ministry of Tertiary Education.

We received close to TT $9.1 billion, close to 20 per cent of our annual expenditure and nearly six per cent of our GDP, matching and surpassing the expenditure of education of England, Canada, the US and Finland where some of them are spending less than 20 per cent of their annual expenditure and less than six per cent of their GDP,” he said.

He was speaking yesterday at the launch of the National Youth Productivity Forum 2012/2013 at AmCham’s head office, Maraval Road, Port-of-Spain. Gopeesingh called AmCham’s education endeavours “admirable” in the light of a decline of private sector involvement in the education system over the past few years.

“The private sector used to take the lead in such initiatives setting great examples for our country but in recent years with the intervention of the state in major education programmes it seems that the general interest in these are on the decline.”