I will like to make a special plea to the Minister of Finance to have a special focus in the next budget on exports of goods and services.
This is, in my mind, the only way in which the country can gain real income.
If we increase trade within the country, it is only the same amount of money changing hands but no new money is being created. We need to bring in money from the outside of the country and this can only come from the sales of goods and services to other countries.
Other than that we are only spinning top in mud as they say.
We have to get both the private and public sectors to see the importance of getting business from outside of T&T.
The challenge will then be how do we get these foreign money earned from the private sector back into the country. Issues of corporate tax etc, and their monitoring are of extreme importance here.
For example, if company A makes one million dollars in profit from selling goods and services in the Caribbean market, how do we ensure that we get the legal amount of tax from those sales without the profits being "hidden" away? Do we have that level of trust in the local auditing firms to verify these things?
Therefore, while we should focus on exports to generate more money for the country, we have to institute the necessary checks and balances to ensure we get what is legally ours.
Ronald Seegobin