In the last cou­ple years T&T’s rank­ing for the ease of do­ing busi­ness has slipped.

While the Trade Min­istry has im­ple­ment­ed sev­er­al ini­tia­tives aimed at im­prov­ing this coun­try’s rank­ing, T&T is small and has a more com­plex trad­ing busi­ness en­vi­ron­ment, said Trade min­is­ter Paula Gopee-Scoon.

She made the state­ment at a press con­fer­ence held yes­ter­day while an­nounc­ing mea­sures to pos­i­tive­ly im­pact the ease of do­ing busi­ness in T&T.

“We have ac­com­plished sig­nif­i­cant head­way in the num­ber of ser­vices that we have. But it re­quires more than that.

It re­quires deep analy­sis and fur­ther rec­om­men­da­tion go­ing back to all of our trade or­di­nances and per­haps we have gone too deep but that’s where we have to go,” Gopee-Scoon said.

She said she was not please about T&T’s po­si­tion on the ease of do­ing busi­ness rank­ing but as­sured that Gov­ern­ment was “deal­ing with it” and en­sur­ing greater col­lab­o­ra­tion with the pri­vate sec­tor.

“The idea is not so much to bask on the lit­tle we have done but we have tak­en a ro­bust look at what needs to be done and we are on our way. We just have to be dili­gent in our ap­pli­ca­tion to en­sure it is done,” Gopee-Scoon not­ed.

She added one of the key ob­jec­tives of the Gov­ern­ment has al­ways been the im­prove­ment of the do­mes­tic busi­ness, trade and in­vest­ment en­vi­ron­ment, through leg­isla­tive, ad­min­is­tra­tive and in­sti­tu­tion­al re­forms.

Gopee-Scoon not­ed key busi­ness re­forms un­der­tak­en by the Gov­ern­ment over the past four years to as­sist the pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tor in­clud­ed strength­en­ing of the Sin­gle Elec­tron­ic Win­dow (SEW) for Trade and Busi­ness Fa­cil­i­ta­tion, ad­vanc­ing re­forms in spe­cif­ic in­di­ca­tors in the World Bank’s Do­ing Busi­ness In­dex, re­vi­sion of Ser­vices Stan­dards through the new In­vest­ment Frame­work and strength­en­ing the Sin­gle Elec­tron­ic Win­dow (SEW).

She said mod­ern trade leg­is­la­tion would fa­cil­i­tate the achieve­ment of the coun­try’s trade pol­i­cy, the align­ment of the na­tion­al and re­gion­al oblig­a­tions, adap­ta­tion to in­ter­na­tion­al trade de­vel­op­ments and help meet the chang­ing needs of do­mes­tic ex­porters.

“Al­though amend­ments have been un­der­tak­en on in­di­vid­ual pieces of leg­is­la­tion, a com­pre­hen­sive re­view of ex­ist­ing leg­is­la­tion and in­tro­duc­tion of new leg­is­la­tion in trade and busi­ness re­lat­ed ar­eas were iden­ti­fied as a pri­or­i­ty.

As such, con­sul­tant Maxwell Stamp PLC was en­gaged in 2018 who de­vel­oped a Di­ag­nos­tic Re­view of the In­sti­tu­tion­al Frame­work for Trade and Busi­ness in T&T,” Gopee-Scoon added.