Rose­marie Sant

In just un­der sev­en days Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert will present the coun­try's fis­cal pack­age in an eco­nom­ic cli­mate which the Cen­tral Bank has said is chal­lenged by low­er glob­al en­er­gy prices, re­duc­tion in lo­cal gas and oil pro­duc­tion and Gov­ern­ment spend­ing cuts.

It is very like­ly that the val­ue of the fis­cal pack­age could be in the re­gion of $57 bil­lion.

Im­bert is ex­pect­ed to ad­dress out­stand­ing debts owed to pub­lic of­fi­cers and con­trac­tors.

Par­tial pay­ment of both debts have been made but a huge sum re­mains out­stand­ing. In the case of the con­trac­tors, over $2 bil­lion is still owed and con­trac­tors are hop­ing that there would be some ef­fort to pay off the debt and give new hope to the in­dus­try, even in the face of fis­cal pru­dence which would have to be adopt­ed by the Gov­ern­ment.

In April this year, dur­ing a mid-year re­view, Im­bert re­vised the $63 bil­lion fis­cal pack­age an­nounced last Oc­to­ber to $59 bil­lion. He has al­ready in­di­cat­ed that he wants to "bring the Gov­ern­ment fi­nances in­to ap­prox­i­mate bal­ance by fis­cal year 2018."

Im­bert told the coun­try a year ago that he was aim­ing to re­duce the deficit from $7 bil­lion or 4.2 per cent of Gross Do­mes­tic Prod­uct (GDP) to $2.8 bil­lion or an es­ti­mat­ed 1.7 per cent of GDP.

In the past year State en­ter­pris­es, statu­to­ry bod­ies, all min­istries and the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly were di­rect­ed to re­view their op­er­a­tions and make iden­ti­fi­able ad­just­ments of a sev­en per cent re­duc­tion in pro­posed op­er­at­ing ex­pens­es.

Gov­ern­ment al­so with­drew US$375 mil­lion or TT$10 bil­lion from the Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund in May of this year.

But the Cen­tral Bank's quar­ter­ly re­port re­leased in ear­ly Sep­tem­ber re­ports that for the pe­ri­od Oc­to­ber 2015 to June 2016 Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment reg­is­tered a deficit of $6.2 bil­lion or 4.6 per cent of GDP."

The de­te­ri­o­ra­tion, ac­cord­ing to the Cen­tral Bank, was due pri­mar­i­ly to "a sharp fall-off in en­er­gy rev­enues which was par­tial­ly off­set by a re­duc­tion in Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment spend­ing."

En­er­gy rev­enues de­clined to $4.8 bil­lion. Non-tax rev­enue from the non-en­er­gy sec­tor grew to $6.6 bil­lion.

Tax­es from in­come, as well as re­ceipts from goods and ser­vices re­mained rel­a­tive­ly flat. VAT col­lec­tions to­talled $4,711.5 mil­lion.

Trans­fers and sub­si­dies fell by $1.6 bil­lion to $20.9 bil­lion as a re­sult of a fall-off in the pe­tro­le­um sub­sidy to $466.3 mil­lion in the nine-month pe­ri­od.

The Cen­tral Bank re­port said Gov­ern­ment col­lect­ed rough­ly "$30.3 bil­lion in the nine month pe­ri­od to June this year.

Re­spect­ed busi­ness pub­li­ca­tion, Bloomberg, al­so paints a gloomy pic­ture, not­ing the num­bers from the Cen­tral Bank re­port which not­ed GDP con­tract­ed 5.2 per cent in the first quar­ter, the largest con­trac­tion since 2009.

Head­line in­fla­tion in­creased to 3.4 per cent in June from 2.4 per cent at start of year.

Nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion dropped 11.2 per cent in first half of the year;

Crude oil pro­duc­tion was down by 10.4 per cent.

It is in this sce­nario that the min­is­ter will present the fis­cal mea­sures next Fri­day.

Where will ma­jor al­lo­ca­tions be?

Giv­en the crime sit­u­a­tion there is ex­pec­ta­tion that Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty will again get the biggest slice of the pie, fol­lowed by Ed­u­ca­tion, Health, and Works and In­fra­struc­ture. Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment will al­so be giv­en a larg­er slice of the pie. The Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment elec­tion is due ear­ly next year and the min­istry al­so now has re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the CEPEP pro­gramme.

Over the next sev­en days the T&T Guardian will be delv­ing deep­er in­to the mea­sures an­nounced in the 2015-2016 fis­cal pack­age and ex­am­in­ing how the mon­ey was spent.

We will look at some key min­istries and the al­lo­ca­tions, what they achieved and where they failed.

In to­mor­row's Sun­day Guardian we ex­am­ine the al­lo­ca­tions to Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty and Health.