The T&T busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty cur­rent­ly faces a stark set of op­er­a­tional re­al­i­ties: per­sis­tent for­eign ex­change con­straints; a ris­ing cost of do­ing busi­ness across en­er­gy and lo­gis­tics; sig­nif­i­cant weak­ness­es in trade fa­cil­i­ta­tion and port ef­fi­cien­cy; skills and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty gaps; as well as lim­it­ed ac­cess to growth fi­nance and mar­ket in­tel­li­gence, par­tic­u­lar­ly for firms with the am­bi­tion to ex­port but with­out the in­sti­tu­tion­al sup­port re­quired to scale.

Guyana’s Pres­i­dent, Dr Mo­hamed Ir­faan Ali, is call­ing for a 72-hour meet­ing be­tween the gov­ern­ments of Trinidad and To­ba­go and Guyana to se­ri­ous­ly en­gage in es­tab­lish­ing a strong eco­nom­ic part­ner­ship.

In­creased sales did lit­tle to off­set for­eign ex­change chal­lenges and ris­ing labour costs faced by Pres­tige Hold­ings in the first quar­ter of 2026, lead­ing to a de­cline in the com­pa­ny’s prof­its.

En­er­gy Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal has said mar­gin­al in­creas­es in oil pro­duc­tion, sta­bilised nat­ur­al gas out­put, and progress on sev­er­al key en­er­gy projects are ex­pect­ed to un­der­pin T&T’s eco­nom­ic growth in 2027.

Min­is­ter of Plan­ning, Eco­nom­ic Af­fairs and De­vel­op­ment, Kennedy Swarats­ingh, has called for a fun­da­men­tal shift in T&T’s busi­ness cul­ture, urg­ing the pri­vate sec­tor to em­brace in­no­va­tion, as he hailed the rub­ber crumb dis­tri­b­u­tion by the Caribbean In­dus­tri­al Re­search In­sti­tute (Cariri) as a step in the right di­rec­tion.

Last week, in this space, I au­thored a com­men­tary head­lined ‘Is now the time for pri­vati­sa­tion?’ with the pur­pose of gen­er­at­ing a dis­cus­sion on whether the lo­cal state en­ter­prise sec­tor is now too large and re­quires ra­tio­nal­i­sa­tion in or­der to ad­dress the bur­den cer­tain com­pa­nies place on T&T’s fis­cal and its pub­lic debt po­si­tions.

The Fair Trad­ing Com­mis­sion (FTC) and the Reg­u­lat­ed In­dus­tries Com­mis­sion (RIC) have been for­mal­ly re­con­sti­tut­ed, with in­stru­ments of ap­point­ment hand­ed over by Pres­i­dent Chris­tine Kan­ga­loo at Pres­i­dent’s House, end­ing a 10-month gap with­out a func­tion­ing FTC board.

T&T is prepar­ing for a ma­jor eco­nom­ic shift be­tween 2026 and 2027. While the econ­o­my is ex­pect­ed to grow by on­ly 0.7 per cent in 2026, the World Bank fore­casts a strong come­back in 2027, with a re­al GDP growth rate of 3.2 per cent.

Hilton, CAL, TSTT, NGC, PTSC, VM­COTT, etc. What do they have in com­mon? First­ly, they are all to­tal­ly or par­tial­ly, com­mer­cial state en­ti­ties, in one form or the oth­er. Sec­ond­ly, their vi­a­bil­i­ty al­ways comes to the fore in times of tight fis­cal rev­enues, like now, be­cause of the high cost of fund­ing these en­ter­pris­es by the Trea­sury and there­fore by tax­pay­ers. Third­ly, and whether we rec­og­nize it or not, they all re­late to the is­sue of the role of the state in eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty.

For pen­sion­ers earn­ing above $7,500 a month, the Gov­ern­ment’s pledge of tax-free pri­vate pen­sions was sup­posed to take ef­fect from Jan­u­ary 1, 2026.

Dis­rup­tion in the Strait of Hor­muz is be­gin­ning to show up not on­ly in en­er­gy prices but al­so in phys­i­cal com­mod­i­ty flows, and this could car­ry mixed im­pli­ca­tions for T&T.

The Cen­tral Bank of T&T (CBTT) is prepar­ing to roll out sweep­ing changes to the coun­try’s cur­ren­cy, fi­nan­cial reg­u­la­tion and pay­ments ecosys­tem, as it tran­si­tions in­to a new five-year strate­gic cy­cle aimed at mod­ernising the fi­nan­cial sys­tem and strength­en­ing eco­nom­ic re­silience.