JavaScript is disabled in your web browser or browser is too old to support JavaScript. Today almost all web pages contain JavaScript, a scripting programming language that runs on visitor's web browser. It makes web pages functional for specific purposes and if disabled for some reason, the content or the functionality of the web page can be limited or unavailable.

Sunday, July 27, 2025

Colm gets a fair rating from stakeholders

by

Rishard Khan
2266 days ago
20190513

Econ­o­mist Dr Ronald Ramkissoon says from a short-term per­spec­tive, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert did a fair job with the coun­try’s econ­o­my. He, how­ev­er, not­ed that for cit­i­zens to ex­pe­ri­ence the ben­e­fits from any eco­nom­ic growth more needs to be done.

“To the ex­tent that there is growth – it is pos­i­tive and I think we have to recog­nise that. Un­less we come up with the strat­e­gy to grow by up­wards of three, four per cent – some would say five per cent – we not go­ing to make any fun­da­men­tal change to the lives of peo­ple.”

While he said there is no need for pan­ic with the cur­rent state of the econ­o­my, he said there needs to be a fur­ther in­vest­ment and strate­gis­ing around oth­er ac­tiv­i­ties to gen­er­ate rev­enue. He said these in­vest­ments should cen­tre around the non-en­er­gy sec­tors.

De­spite the econ­o­my now run­ning at an in­creased deficit of $300 mil­lion over the orig­i­nal­ly bud­get­ed $51.77 bil­lion, Ramkissoon de­scribed the re­view as “un­sur­pris­ing.”

“There is noth­ing fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent from the fig­ures (pre­sent­ed in the 2019 bud­get) and in terms of what is hap­pen­ing.”

In a re­lease yes­ter­day, the T&T Cham­ber of Com­merce said the fig­ures out­lined in the re­view “presents some hope for the wider pri­vate sec­tor in the com­ing months.”

The cham­ber was al­so pleased to hear Im­bert’s com­ments on some long out­stand­ing is­sues they have been lob­by­ing for over the years.

Im­bert was com­mend­ed for com­mit­ting to pay con­trac­tors and the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Rev­enue Au­thor­i­ty (TTRA). They added that while the tax amnesty was de­signed to help the TTRA’s tran­si­tion, which they be­lieve is long over­due, they cau­tioned that a time­line for tran­si­tion must be es­tab­lished and ad­hered to.

The cham­ber added that oth­er as­pects of the pre­sen­ta­tion (such as the bal­ance of pay­ments) war­rant fur­ther analy­sis.

“These will no doubt be­come ap­par­ent in the course of dis­cus­sions in the pub­lic do­main dur­ing the com­ing days. The var­i­ous ac­tions and poli­cies out­lined should help to spur eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty and al­low im­prove­ments in the macro-eco­nom­ic en­vi­ron­ment to trick­le down. The cham­ber will con­tin­ue to en­gage Gov­ern­ment on is­sues of im­por­tance for the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty,” the re­lease said.

Speak­ing dur­ing a pan­el dis­cus­sion on CNC3’s “Ease the Squeeze,” which re­viewed the mid-year bud­get, econ­o­mist In­dera Sage­wan said while Im­bert had every right to be hap­py about the econ­o­my’s pos­i­tive growth, she was con­cerned over how he in­tends to sus­tain it.

“It has hap­pened un­der his watch and there­fore he de­serves to take cred­it for that. He did make hard de­ci­sions in the past cou­ple of years. The chal­lenge I have is how do we sus­tain that growth?” Sage­wan said.

She said her con­cerns were based in part be­cause a huge part of the growth rests on the oil and gas sec­tor, which is now chal­lenged due to re­cent re­ports of a short­age of nat­ur­al gas sup­ply by BPTT to At­lantic LNG’s Train 1.

“That im­pacts neg­a­tive­ly Gov­ern­ment’s rev­enue. It im­pacts over­all,” she said.


Related articles

Sponsored

Weather

PORT OF SPAIN WEATHER

Sponsored