As po­lit­i­cal­ly tempt­ing as it might be to sug­ar-coat the facts when Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert de­liv­ers the mid-term bud­get re­view, he should take the op­por­tu­ni­ty to lev­el with the T&T pub­lic about the eco­nom­ic re­al­i­ties ahead.

It would be easy to point to the re­cent In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund’s (IMF) fore­cast for a strong eco­nom­ic re­cov­ery this year while gloss­ing over the mul­ti­lat­er­al agency’s warn­ing about down­side risks. How­ev­er, the pro­ject­ed 5.5 per cent growth in GDP is de­pen­dent on the re­cov­ery in oil and gas pro­duc­tion, among oth­er fac­tors.

As ea­ger as this pop­u­la­tion might be for some good news about the econ­o­my, it would be bet­ter to fo­cus on fis­cal pru­dence giv­en con­tin­ued un­cer­tain­ty from the on­go­ing COVID-19 pan­dem­ic and the far-reach­ing ef­fects of Rus­sia’s in­va­sion of Ukraine.

Af­ter a few years of low to neg­a­tive growth caused main­ly by con­trac­tions in the en­er­gy sec­tor, this coun­try is still ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a re­cov­ery that is slow and un­even.

The pri­or­i­ty needs to be struc­tur­al re­forms to help di­ver­si­fy the econ­o­my, re­duce pub­lic debt lev­els, in­crease com­pet­i­tive­ness, at­tract in­vest­ment, and take any oth­er steps need­ed to make this coun­try more re­silient to re­gion­al and glob­al shocks.

The roll­back of pan­dem­ic re­stric­tions, im­proved com­mod­i­ty prices and new projects in the en­er­gy sec­tor due to come on stream lat­er in the year are all good for T&T’s eco­nom­ic health, but a boom is not around the cor­ner.

There is still the mat­ter of con­tin­ued re­duc­tion in en­er­gy sec­tor pro­duc­tion. In ad­di­tion, da­ta from the Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice (CSO) shows that head­line in­fla­tion is on an up­ward tra­jec­to­ry due to in­creas­es in in­ter­na­tion­al food prices, high­er ship­ping costs, and glob­al sup­ply chain dis­rup­tions.

Cit­i­zens are be­ing hit hard in their pock­ets, and the re­cent in­creas­es in fu­el prices have on­ly added to the hard­ships.

What the pop­u­la­tion is most in­ter­est­ed in at this time are not the usu­al promis­es of bet­ter days ahead but a dis­cus­sion of more prac­ti­cal, down-to-earth mat­ters such as mea­sures to ad­dress the im­pact of in­fla­tion.

Fis­cal pro­jec­tions for the rest of the year should be framed in the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion of slow­ing glob­al growth, which is down from an es­ti­mat­ed 6.1 per cent last year to 3.6 per cent–0.8 and 0.2 per­cent­age points low­er than had been pro­ject­ed at the start of the year.

Un­like the full-scale bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion lat­er in the year, this mid-year re­view is not ex­pect­ed to in­clude the in­tro­duc­tion of new fis­cal mea­sures or ma­jor ad­just­ments to ex­ist­ing ones. In­stead, at the halfway point of what was in­tro­duced in the last bud­get, this will be more of a sta­tus re­port and as­sess­ment of those mea­sures.

Mr Im­bert, now well versed in these pre­sen­ta­tions, should be mind­ful, how­ev­er, of the strange and un­cer­tain times in which he will de­liv­er his lat­est state­ment on the econ­o­my. This is a na­tion that is still on­ly on the cusp of re­cov­ery, prone to ex­ter­nal fac­tors, and there­fore del­i­cate­ly poised.

Bud­gets and midterm re­views are oc­ca­sions for po­lit­i­cal en­gage­ments on all sides of the ide­o­log­i­cal di­vide that can ob­scure and dis­tort the facts.

But if ever there was a time to lev­el with this pop­u­la­tion and have a straight­for­ward con­ver­sa­tion about the econ­o­my and what lies ahead, it is now.