Nadaleen Singh

UWI econ­o­mist Dr Roger Ho­sein yes­ter­day pre­dict­ed that T&T's eco­nom­ic re­ces­sion will con­tin­ue un­til the third quar­ter of 2017. He warned, how­ev­er, that the strat­e­gy cur­rent­ly be­ing used to lift the coun­try out of the re­ces­sion might not work be­cause it was the same one used al­most two decades ago.

"The strat­e­gy seems to be one that mir­rors the type of ac­tiv­i­ty that we en­gaged in 1999 to 2008 which is sim­ply pro­duc­ing more nat­ur­al gas. It can­not be that. The eco­nom­ic rent that we gen­er­ate from the nat­ur­al gas and pe­tro­le­um sec­tor as a whole can­not be used now to fund con­sump­tion. It has to be used to widen and deep­en the eco­nom­ic space by more cap­i­tal in­ter­ven­tion in the econ­o­my with some pro­por­tion of the eco­nom­ic rent al­so go­ing in­to the Sta­bi­liza­tion Fund," he said.

Dr Ho­sein, who spoke on the is­sue fol­low­ing the me­dia launch of Glob­al En­tre­pre­neur­ship Week (GEW) at TSTT's Booth, Queen's Park Oval, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day, said Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Colm Im­bert did the "right thing" by im­ple­ment­ing a tax on on­line pur­chas­es. He sug­gest­ed that the tax should be 10 per cent and said it would be ef­fec­tive in de­creas­ing the amount of con­sump­tion items pur­chased over­seas.

Com­ment­ing on oil prices, he said: "The price of oil is prob­a­bly go­ing to in­crease de­pend­ing on what de­ci­sions OPEC makes next year. That prob­a­bly will not man­i­fest it­self in a sharp in­crease by US$10 or US $12 with the WTI or Brent."

He is rec­om­mend­ing that the oil price on which the na­tion­al bud­get is pegged be kept at be­tween US$43 and US$53 a bar­rel.

GEW 2016 will be cel­e­brat­ed from No­vem­ber 5 and 15 with a se­ries of ac­tiv­i­ties sched­uled across the coun­try. Dale Laugh­lin, chair­man, of Youth Busi­ness T&T (YBTT) said af­ter 16 years of ex­is­tence the group can boast of many suc­cess sto­ries when it comes to as­sist­ing en­tre­pre­neurs. She said YBTT now needs more fund­ing to stim­u­late en­tre­pre­neur­ship fur­ther.

"We need fi­nan­cial sup­port, skills and tech­ni­cal ex­per­tise from pri­vate sec­tor busi­ness­es, gov­ern­ment, in­ter­na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment agen­cies and foun­da­tions," she said.

Re­fer­ring to work com­plet­ed in the last 12 to 18 months, Laugh­lin said YBTT fo­cused on build­ing in­ter­nal ca­pac­i­ty to make its suite of sup­port ser­vices more rel­e­vant to bud­ding en­tre­pre­neurs.

GEW is the largest cel­e­bra­tion of in­no­va­tors, job cre­ators and fi­nanciers who launch start-ups, bring ideas to life and dri­ve eco­nom­ic growth. It is cel­e­brat­ed in 160 coun­tries.