Labour Min­is­ter Er­rol McLeod said there are pos­i­tive in­di­ca­tors of T&T's per­for­mance on the 2012 Glob­al Com­pet­i­tive­ness In­dex. "Ac­cord­ing to the Com­pet­i­tive­ness In­dex, T&T ranked com­mend­ably in the ar­eas of in­fra­struc­ture, health and pri­ma­ry ed­u­ca­tion, plac­ing 19th out of 144 coun­tries. How­ev­er, the in­dex sug­gest­ed that T&T should seek to im­prove its labour mar­ket ef­fi­cien­cy, in­clud­ing labour-em­ploy­er re­la­tions and flex­i­bil­i­ty of wage de­ter­mi­na­tion.

"Im­prove­ment to its goods mar­ket ef­fi­cien­cy, in par­tic­u­lar the num­ber of days to start a busi­ness, the bur­den of cus­toms pro­ce­dures and cus­tomer ori­en­ta­tion as well as im­prove­ment in in­no­va­tion were al­so high­light­ed," he said at the sign­ing of a Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing (MOU) be­tween George­town Uni­ver­si­ty and the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) for de­vel­op­ment of a Work­force Re­search and De­vel­op­ment Cen­tre.

McLeod said de­spite chal­lenges, T&T's econ­o­my is far­ing bet­ter than many economies around the world."Since the glob­al fi­nan­cial cri­sis of 2008, most of the ad­vanced, as well as de­vel­op­ing, economies have been fac­ing wide­spread and grow­ing prob­lems of un­sus­tain­able debt, neg­a­tive growth and in­creas­ing un­em­ploy­ment, of­ten cou­pled with high in­fla­tion. I must say that T&T, de­spite our chal­lenges, has done bet­ter than many oth­er coun­tries in the man­age­ment of the econ­o­my," he said.

The min­is­ter said gov­ern­ment is aware that it needs to close­ly mon­i­tor and even­tu­al­ly elim­i­nate "tem­po­rary fis­cal deficits" to care­ful­ly man­age the un­em­ploy­ment rate, which is around 5.4 per cent, and to con­ti­nous­ly seek to im­ple­ment poli­cies that would im­prove the stan­dard of liv­ing of cit­i­zens.He said the Work­force Re­search and De­vel­op­ment Cen­tre will help T&T's econ­o­my grow and be­come more com­pet­i­tive.

"In most de­vel­op­ing coun­tries, con­cerns about work­force de­vel­op­ment are wide­spread, af­fect­ing not on­ly the mod­ern wage sec­tor but al­so the agri­cul­tur­al and in­for­mal sec­tor. The in­for­ma­tion pro­vid­ed can lead to a more pro­duc­tive work­force, low­er un­em­ploy­ment, pro­gres­sion up the val­ue chain and pover­ty re­duc­tion," McLeod said.