In yes­ter­day's ed­i­to­r­i­al, it was sug­gest­ed that Min­is­ter of Fi­nance, Lar­ry Howai, use the bud­get to achieve three broad ob­jec­tives com­pris­ing ef­fi­cient ex­pen­di­ture, the main­te­nance of sta­bil­i­ty and kick­start­ing the econ­o­my. There is a fourth im­por­tant and over­ar­ch­ing ob­jec­tive that the min­is­ter should bear in mind as he com­pletes his prepa­ra­tions for Mon­day's 2013 bud­get: the need for the Gov­ern­ment to start think­ing and sig­nalling the need for the coun­try to em­bark on a pol­i­cy of fis­cal con­sol­i­da­tion.

This means that the Gov­ern­ment should be ac­tive­ly plan­ning to in­tro­duce poli­cies aimed at re­duc­ing the coun­try's deficit and cur­tail­ing the con­se­quent ac­cu­mu­la­tion of debt. All over the world, there is co­gent ev­i­dence that coun­tries that de­lay the im­per­a­tive of bring­ing their fis­cal ac­counts in­to bal­ance-by en­sur­ing that gov­ern­ment spend­ing is more close­ly aligned gov­ern­ment rev­enue-end up in se­ri­ous fi­nan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties.

Any­one read­ing the Guardian's busi­ness pages re­cent­ly must be struck by the pletho­ra of sto­ries on the cri­sis in Eu­rope in which coun­tries such as Spain, Por­tu­gal, Greece, Italy and Ire­land have end­ed up hav­ing to pay the price for de­lay­ing the im­ple­men­ta­tion of poli­cies aimed at re­duc­ing ex­pen­di­ture or in­creas­ing rev­enue of both.

As some­one who is very at­tuned to the in­ter­na­tion­al en­vi­ron­ment by virtue of his suc­cess as a leader of a lo­cal com­mer­cial bank, the ra­tio­nal side of Mr Howai must be telling him that he should be us­ing the pre­sen­ta­tion of the 2013 bud­get to sig­nal to the pop­u­la­tion the need for belt-tight­en­ing in the con­text of the volatile world econ­o­my and the de­pen­dence of the Trea­sury on rev­enues earned from the sale of T&T's petro­chem­i­cal ex­ports.

Giv­en his ref­er­ence to the need to in­tro­duce aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures at a speech ear­li­er this month, it is quite clear that Mr Howai is aware of what needs to be done. He knows that a gov­ern­ment in a small, open, en­er­gy-dom­i­nat­ed econ­o­my-one which is al­most com­plete­ly at the whims of ex­ter­nal petro­chem­i­cal mar­kets to gen­er­ate and dri­ve rev­enue for lo­cal con­sump­tion-has con­trol over its ex­pen­di­ture.

But the pre­vail­ing en­vi­ron­ment of glob­al un­cer­tain­ty and volatil­i­ty means that no one has a crys­tal ball that is able to pre­dict ac­cu­rate­ly whether en­er­gy rev­enues will be high, low or in be­tween. For ex­am­ple, this means that if the Gov­ern­ment plans to spend $57 bil­lion and col­lect $50 bil­lion in 2013, but there is slip­page in ex­port prices, the rev­enue out­turn will suf­fer.

The ad­min­is­tra­tion will be forced in­to a po­si­tion of hav­ing to scram­ble to bor­row, slash ex­pen­di­ture or im­pose high­er tax­es in or­der to main­tain fis­cal sta­bil­i­ty. As Mr Howai well knows, it is wis­er not to plan for a deficit-far less three more years of deficits as this will give the pop­u­la­tion a false ex­pec­ta­tion of the state of the lo­cal econ­o­my and leave it un­pre­pared for the ad­just­ments that the coun­try will in­evitably be re­quired to make.

What Mr Howai should be look­ing to do is make pru­dent ad­just­ments to gov­ern­ment's re­cur­rent spend­ing at this point, while en­sur­ing that the cap­i­tal ex­pen­di­ture nec­es­sary to stim­u­late the con­struc­tion sec­tor is in place with the im­ple­men­ta­tion ma­chin­ery primed for de­liv­ery. Giv­en the cycli­cal na­ture of the petro­chem­i­cal busi­ness, it is cer­tain that T&T will ex­pe­ri­ence a sig­nif­i­cant re­ver­sal of for­tune in its en­er­gy rev­enues with­in the next three years.

It would be bet­ter, there­fore, for the min­is­ter of fi­nance to un­der­take a re­laxed, prun­ing ap­proach to ad­just­ment at this point rather than find­ing him­self hav­ing to adopt the cut­lass ap­proach lat­er on. The cut­lass ap­proach, ob­vi­ous­ly, would in­volve forc­ing ad­just­ment down the throats of the pop­u­la­tion. The new Fi­nance Min­is­ter finds him­self to­day in a sim­i­lar po­si­tion to that of the late Prime Min­is­ter George Cham­bers in 1981 when he in­her­it­ed the ad­min­is­tra­tion of the coun­try from T&T's first prime min­is­ter, Er­ic Williams.

"The fete is over," Mr Cham­bers fa­mous­ly said, at what was the end of the sev­en­ties oil boom: "It's time to get back to work." While Mr Cham­bers said the right words, he was not by na­ture some­one dis­posed to ad­min­is­ter the nec­es­sary med­i­cine. It is hoped that Mr Howai does not re­peat the mis­takes of 31 years ago.