Charles Kong Soo

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Win­ston Dook­er­an says new em­pha­sis must be placed on sourc­ing fund­ing from pri­vate/pub­lic part­ner­ships for the health sec­tor. "A large part of our fi­nan­cial re­sources are de­vot­ed to the health sec­tor but as we look ahead we will nev­er be able to pro­vide enough un­less we change the method by draw­ing on new re­sources in­to play," the act­ing Prime Min­is­ter said. "A new em­pha­sis must now be placed on search­ing for pri­vate and pub­lic part­ner­ship arrange­ments and fi­nanc­ing in the health sec­tor." Dook­er­an was speak­ing at a Pri­vate Pub­lic Part­ner­ships sem­i­nar host­ed by the Cana­di­an High Com­mis­sion in con­junc­tion with the In­ter­na­tion­al Fi­nance Cor­po­ra­tion (IFC) at the Hy­att Re­gency Ho­tel, Wright­son Road, Port-of-Spain, on Tues­day.

Dook­er­an said the Gov­ern­ment had al­ready be­gun to search for a sus­tain­able pen­sion plan to pro­vide a sense of se­cu­ri­ty in the fu­ture. He said the coun­try had grown ac­cus­tomed to search­ing for the Trea­sury to fund such pro­grammes, which had a role to play but in or­der to have long term sus­tain­abil­i­ty the Gov­ern­ment was now work­ing to­wards a fund­able na­tion­al pro­gramme and was try­ing to shift pen­sions from be­com­ing the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of on­ly the Trea­sury. Dook­er­an added in as­so­ci­a­tion with the Na­tion­al In­sur­ance Board (NIB) two new ini­tia­tives would be fund­ed by the pri­vate sec­tor in­volv­ing the in­crease in the min­i­mum lev­el of pen­sions and to in­clude those who had nev­er sub­scribed to pen­sions be­fore.

He al­so re­vealed a new pro­pos­al to ex­pand cap­i­tal mar­ket de­vel­op­ment by en­cour­ag­ing SMEs (small and medi­um-sized en­ter­pris­es) with suf­fi­cient ca­pa­bil­i­ty to en­ter the fi­nance mar­ket to fi­nance their own de­vel­op­ment with tax in­cen­tives. Dook­er­an said sev­en new en­ter­pris­es were iden­ti­fied and would be moved to list­ing on the stock mar­ket on­ly af­ter sev­er­al con­di­tions were met such as en­sur­ing more cit­i­zen own­er­ship. He said Gov­ern­ment would be en­gaged in fi­nan­cial co-op­er­a­tion with the In­fra­struc­ture De­vel­op­ment Bank Ltd (IDOL) which would go be­yond pro­vi­sions of loans and eq­ui­ty in­to guar­an­tees and cap­i­tal mo­bil­i­sa­tion build­ing new buffers through in­ter­est rate sub­si­dies and in­sur­ance prod­ucts.