Not hav­ing had enough time to place his own stamp on projects and de­vise means to restart eco­nom­ic growth, in his maid­en bud­get Fi­nance Min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai gen­er­al­ly went with the di­rec­tion and mea­sures left be­hind by his pre­de­ces­sor, hop­ing to stim­u­late growth as a means of gen­er­at­ing pros­per­i­ty for cit­i­zens.

In that con­text, it is un­der­stand­able that Howai con­tin­ued more or less with the fo­cus on di­ver­si­fy­ing the econ­o­my through sec­tors which have long been iden­ti­fied, and by suc­ceed­ing gov­ern­ments. The re­al­i­ty is that an econ­o­my such as T&T's, with a lim­it­ed range of eco­nom­ic re­sources, means that gov­ern­ments and fi­nance min­is­ters do not have a world of op­tions.

Of the growth poles iden­ti­fied by Howai, the tourism, fi­nan­cial ser­vices, agri­cul­ture of the im­port-re­place­ment type, the now ubiq­ui­tous ICT in­dus­try and the en­er­gy base of the econ­o­my are all pre­dictable and log­i­cal for him to adopt. In the in­stance of en­er­gy, though, it must be un­der­stood the time lag could be five to ten years for the start-up of projects.

Very sig­nif­i­cant­ly, Howai in­tends to re­sus­ci­tate the con­struc­tion sec­tor with a $7.5 bil­lion pro­ject­ed spend for the Pub­lic Sec­tor In­vest­ment Pro­gramme. Again, while not new, the strat­e­gy to in­cor­po­rate the pri­vate sec­tor in de­sign-build-fi­nance-op­er­ate and main­tain in­fra­struc­ture projects across the coun­try is sure to grab the at­ten­tion of the pri­vate sec­tor. Con­struc­tion is al­ways a sure means of stim­u­lat­ing in­vest­ment and cre­at­ing jobs in an econ­o­my.

How­ev­er, the long-term suc­cess of any such project will de­pend on whether con­struc­tion is fo­cused on eco­nom­ic in­fra­struc­ture which in turn holds the pos­si­bil­i­ties for growth be­yond the con­struc­tion phase. With the sec­tor all but shut down in the re­cent past, restart­ing the en­gines could take some time and need fi­nan­cial rev-ups. Of con­cern, too, must be Howai's state­ment that there is now full em­ploy­ment.

While on the face of it this is good news pure and sim­ple, it rais­es the ques­tion of where, in that case, skilled labour is to come from, at what price and the nec­es­sary con­sul­ta­tion that has to take place with labour to avoid con­flict. The ob­vi­ous com­men­tary on the mea­sure that has gained most at­ten­tion-that is the cut­back on the $4 bil­lion fu­el sub­sidy-is that it had to be­gin some time.

The ex­pec­ta­tion ex­pressed by the Prime Min­is­ter is that the $1.75 in­crease on pre­mi­um gaso­line will not trig­ger in­fla­tion­ary pres­sures in the econ­o­my. That is left to be seen. The pro­ject­ed five-year time frame for some­thing ap­proach­ing sig­nif­i­cant con­ver­sion to CNG seems a rea­son­able pro­pos­al-though it is not a new one and has al­ready been around for at least that long.

To give sup­port and di­rec­tion to the mas­sive pub­lic sec­tor in­vest­ment pro­gramme re­quires a trans­formed pub­lic ser­vice. When Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion Car­olyn Seep­er­sad-Bachan comes to out­line the mea­sures in her min­istry, she will give an ap­pre­ci­a­tion of how dis­posed is her min­istry to fa­cil­i­tate the achieve­ment of greater ef­fi­cien­cy in the thrust out­lined to ser­vice the projects.

In any case, the PSIP and oth­er pub­lic-sec­tor-dri­ven eco­nom­ic ini­tia­tives an­nounced must be pro­ject­ed to be­come op­er­a­tional in two to three years, at least. In a re­fresh­ing change from tra­di­tion, the Fi­nance Min­is­ter-a new­com­er to pol­i­tics-re­frained from pat­ting his Gov­ern­ment on the back for its achieve­ments, ei­ther re­al or imag­ined, since the last bud­get.

The down­side of this was that, un­for­tu­nate­ly, he gave the coun­try a su­per­fi­cial re­port on how the econ­o­my per­formed in 2012. A thor­ough re­view is need­ed to in­di­cate what pro­grammes and projects have worked, those that have not and what have been the rea­sons for their fail­ure or suc­cess. Howai's mat­ter-of-fact pre­sen­ta­tion, how­ev­er, set a good prece­dent for a rea­soned bud­get de­bate in which par­tic­i­pants con­sid­er what is best for the coun­try rather than try­ing to score points for their own po­lit­i­cal side.