The much an­tic­i­pat­ed na­tion­al bud­get de­bate col­lapsed with a whim­per last week. The back and forth as to who was re­spon­si­ble and why is large­ly ir­rel­e­vant out­side of the pol­i­tics. This col­umn is tak­ing the eco­nom­ic vac­u­um cre­at­ed by the lack of de­bate to in­tro­duce the most crit­i­cal is­sue in­to the na­tion­al con­ver­sa­tion. It is an is­sue which will de­ter­mine how we man­age our eco­nom­ic af­fairs for the rest of our lives and so it is rel­e­vant to every­one with the abil­i­ty to read this col­umn.

With the Unit­ed States and Venezuela draw­ing clos­er to a mil­i­tary con­flict and T&T po­ten­tial­ly be­ing drawn in­to the mid­dle of it, there could be se­ri­ous eco­nom­ic and hu­man­i­tar­i­an con­se­quences that T&T must pre­pare for.

T&T took a ma­jor step to­ward its dig­i­tal fu­ture this week as three na­tion­al in­sti­tu­tions—the Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion (UTC), the Na­tion­al Pay­ment and In­no­va­tion Com­pa­ny of Trinidad and To­ba­go (NPIC-TT), and the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of Trinidad and To­ba­go (TSTT)—signed a land­mark agree­ment to in­tro­duce a na­tion­al elec­tron­ic Know Your Cus­tomer (eKYC) plat­form.

The 2025 No­bel Prize in Eco­nom­ic Sci­ences was award­ed last week to three eco­nom­ic his­to­ri­ans who proved that in­no­va­tion, not nat­ur­al re­sources, is the true dri­ver of growth and pros­per­i­ty. Their work in­vites re­flec­tion on Trinidad and To­ba­go’s de­vel­op­ment path com­pared with Sin­ga­pore’s.

Over the past few weeks, we have high­light­ed the en­er­gy sec­tor’s con­tri­bu­tion to the econ­o­my of T&T. A vi­tal area of this sec­tor is the en­er­gy ser­vices sub­sec­tor, which con­sists of the many lo­cal and for­eign con­trac­tors that ex­e­cute projects for the coun­try’s ma­jor op­er­a­tors.

When en­tre­pre­neur Mark Pereira de­cid­ed to re­turn home from Syd­ney, Aus­tralia, to build a fin­tech com­pa­ny, he didn’t look for a safe­ty net.

The Gov­ern­ment ex­pects to col­lect $5.03 bil­lion in rev­enue from the prof­its earned by non-fi­nan­cial state en­ter­pris­es in the 2026 fi­nan­cial year.

Ma­jor­i­ty state-owned Caribbean Air­lines Ltd (CAL) is poised to sig­nif­i­cant­ly re­duce its debt ser­vic­ing costs re­lat­ed to in­ter­est on lo­cal loans be­tween the 2024 fi­nan­cial year and the cur­rent 2026 fi­nan­cial year, sig­nalling a strate­gic shift to­ward greater fi­nan­cial sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

Ask the av­er­age econ­o­mist about the key dri­vers of eco­nom­ic growth and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, and you will like­ly hear about prices, labour, cap­i­tal mar­kets and mon­e­tary pol­i­cy. Rarely will cre­ativ­i­ty, knowl­edge, tech­no­log­i­cal in­no­va­tion and re­search and de­vel­op­ment (R&D) make the list. When in­no­va­tion does en­ter the con­ver­sa­tion, it is of­ten through the pi­o­neer­ing 1942 work of Joseph Schum­peter, who in­tro­duced the con­cept of cre­ative de­struc­tion which ex­plains how waves of in­dus­tri­al com­pe­ti­tion and tech­no­log­i­cal change trans­form economies. His ideas helped ex­plain the dy­nam­ics of the Third In­dus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion dri­ven by com­put­ers and the in­ter­net and re­main a use­ful lens for un­der­stand­ing to­day’s trans­for­ma­tive wave pow­ered by Gen­er­a­tive Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence.

The Em­ploy­ers Con­sul­ta­tive As­so­ci­a­tion (ECA) holds the view that the In­dus­tri­al Court must con­tin­ue to dis­play fair­ness in its ad­ju­di­ca­tion of labour dis­putes.

Lo­cal con­glom­er­ate ANSA McAL yes­ter­day turned the sod to sig­nal the start of con­struc­tion on a 110,000 square foot mall that will house a wide va­ri­ety of stores plus cul­tur­al land­marks and vi­brant pub­lic spaces.

Con­struc­tion com­pa­ny ex­ec­u­tive and chair­man of De­sal­cott, Yash­mid Kara­math, is one of three new di­rec­tors of Re­pub­lic Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings Ltd (RFHL), the Port-of-Spain-head­quar­tered fi­nan­cial ser­vices group, which is the largest com­pa­ny of its kind in the Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty (Cari­com) re­gion.