Economist Dr Indera Sagewan-Alli says that despite T&T's oil and gas wealth the country has been outperformed by Guyana, Suriname and Barbados in achieving positive growth. She was speaking at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Caribbean Centre for Competitiveness (CCfC) seminar titled, Innovation, Clusters and Competitiveness: the role of the University and a University based Competitiveness Centre, at the UWI Institute of Critical Thinking in St Augustine, on March 6. "In the region today there are only three economies that are realising positive economic growth, Guyana, Suriname and Barbados," Sagewan-Alli said.
"For all of T&T's natural resources, its gas and oil and significant manufacturing sector has been recording consecutive years of negative growth. "How do we change that?" Sagewan-Alli queried. "That is the imperative."
The CCfC executive director added that the private sector was the engine of growth. In the current times the private sector was suffering some conditions that had our economies as a whole either in negative growth, or unable to come out of the trap that the current global financial crisis finds it in she added. Sagewan-Alli raised questions regarding the role the centre can play in terms of moving our economies out of where they are, into that phase of growth once again.
Key presenter, Professor Adam Holbrook, associate director of the Centre for Policy Research on Science and Technology (CPROST), and adjunct Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, said most people tend to think of innovation as only an economic concept. It is also a social progress, he added. He said that not every country was exclusively market driven, and in most countries parts of the productive sector were controlled either directly or indirectly by the state through regulation.