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Tuesday, July 22, 2025

T&T scores US$31.8m surplus

by

20140316

Dur­ing the third quar­ter of 2013, the bal­ance of pay­ments (BOP) reg­is­tered an over­all sur­plus of US$31.8 mil­lion, an im­prove­ment over the deficit of US$399.1 mil­lion in the third quar­ter of 2012, the Cen­tral Bank said in its Eco­nom­ic Bul­letin for Jan­u­ary 2014.The BOP is the method coun­tries use to mon­i­tor all trades–in­flows and out­flows of US dol­lars–con­duct­ed by the pri­vate and pub­lic sec­torsto de­ter­mine how much mon­ey is go­ing in and out of a coun­try.

"Gross of­fi­cial re­serves there­fore climbed to US$9.42 bil­lion at the end of Sep­tem­ber 2013 af­ter dip­ping slight­ly to US$9.18 bil­lion at the end of the first quar­ter of 2013.The ex­ter­nal cur­rent ac­count was es­ti­mat­ed to have post­ed a sur­plus of US$2.24 bil­lion in the third quar­ter of 2013 pe­ri­od com­pared with a sur­plus of US$1.36 bil­lion in the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od one year ago," the Cen­tral Bank re­port­ed?

The im­prove­ment in the cur­rent ac­count main­ly re­flect­ed sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er out­flows of in­vest­ment in­come–in the form of div­i­dends and rein­vest­ed earn­ings–as well as an im­proved ser­vices ac­count.Ini­tial es­ti­mates sug­gest that for the year as a whole, the ex­ter­nal ac­count reg­is­tered a sur­plus of US$786.3 mil­lion, with a sig­nif­i­cant part of this sur­plus due to in­flows from an ex­ter­nal (US$550 mil­lion) bond is­sued in De­cem­ber 2013, the bul­letin said.

Pre­lim­i­nary es­ti­mates sug­gest that the mer­chan­dise trade ac­count reg­is­tered a sur­plus of US$2,549.2 mil­lion in the third quar­ter of 2013, 0.5 per cent be­low the sur­plus of US$2,561.9 mil­lion in the same pe­ri­od in 2012.Ini­tial es­ti­mates sug­gest that en­er­gy ex­ports re­mained high at US$4,243.7 mil­lion in the third quar­ter of 2013.

This was mod­er­ate­ly low­er than the US$4,415.9 mil­lion record­ed in the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od of 2012. Planned main­te­nance ac­tiv­i­ty that start­ed in Sep­tem­ber 2013 ad­verse­ly af­fect­ed pro­duc­tion lev­els while en­er­gy prices were slight­ly low­er as re­flect­ed in the year-on-year de­cline of 1.4 per cent in the En­er­gy Com­mod­i­ty Price In­dex, which is based on T&T's ma­jor en­er­gy ex­ports, for Ju­ly to Sep­tem­ber 2013.

Mean­while, en­er­gy im­ports were es­ti­mat­ed to have in­creased mar­gin­al­ly (5.7 per cent) in the third quar­ter of 2013 as crude re­fin­ing ac­tiv­i­ty at Petrotrin re­cov­ered. The cap­i­tal and fi­nan­cial ac­count record­ed a deficit of US$2,215.6 mil­lion in the third quar­ter of 2013. Ac­cord­ing to pre­lim­i­nary es­ti­mates, some net in­flows of oth­er pri­vate sec­tor cap­i­tal were main­ly due to loans and cur­ren­cy and de­posits.

Net for­eign di­rect in­vest­ment in­flows de­clined from US$543.0 mil­lion in the third quar­ter of 2012 to US$410.8 mil­lion in the third quar­ter of 2013.Com­mer­cial banks re­duced their net for­eign bal­ances abroad lead­ing to net in­flows.This was main­ly due to a de­cline in hold­ings of US trea­sury bills.On the pub­lic sec­tor sub-ac­count, the deficit de­clined to US$262.3 mil­lion in the third quar­ter of 2013 from US$369.6 mil­lion in the third quar­ter of 2012.


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