PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior mul­ti­me­dia re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

There is ma­jor con­cern about the econ­o­my head­ing in­to the 2025 elec­tion sea­son.

This was one of the main take­aways from an eco­nom­ic pulse sur­vey con­duct­ed by the Amer­i­can Cham­ber of Com­merce in part­ner­ship with ac­count­ing firm EY.

"The vast ma­jor­i­ty of re­spon­dents are not con­fi­dent about the econ­o­my in 2025. In fact, the num­bers show an al­most 180-de­gree turn­around in that re­gard from last year to this year. A sig­nif­i­cant pro­por­tion of those who are not con­fi­dent, cit­ed the lack of a clear de­vel­op­ment plan as one of the rea­sons for their con­cern," said Am­cham T&T pres­i­dent Stu­art Fran­co at the busi­ness group's Eco­nom­ic Fo­rum 2025 held at the Hilton Trinidad yes­ter­day.

"It is clear, there­fore, es­pe­cial­ly as we en­ter an elec­tion year, that those as­pir­ing to po­lit­i­cal of­fice have to start talk­ing about pol­i­cy, with specifics, to iden­ti­fy how they pro­pose to ad­dress the myr­i­ad of prob­lems fac­ing T&T. Two, our lead­ers need to find some com­mon ground on key strate­gies that can lead to eco­nom­ic growth. And three, the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty needs to be more close­ly en­gaged as these plans are not on­ly de­vel­oped but al­so rolled out," said Fran­co.

Re­pub­lic Bank econ­o­mist Garvin Joe­field al­so not­ed that the were sev­er­al chal­lenges fac­ing the econ­o­my at the mo­ment in­clud­ing crime, en­er­gy pro­duc­tion lev­els and the for­eign ex­change sit­u­a­tion.

Con­cern­ing the lat­ter, Joe­field felt most is­sues had been high­light­ed ex­ten­sive­ly, but he large­ly felt most of the fo­cus re­gard­ing the for­eign ex­change chal­lenge lin­gered in the short term.

"As it re­lates to the for­eign ex­change chal­lenge, I think we have to re­mem­ber that it is a long-term chal­lenge and we can't keep try­ing to ap­ply short-term so­lu­tions to it. The re­al long-term so­lu­tion is di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion of the econ­o­my and di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion of the sources of for­eign ex­change," said Joe­field.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly he hoped the State of Emer­gency would bring tan­gi­ble change to the crime sit­u­a­tion as there was a telling ef­fect on the econ­o­my.

"Se­cu­ri­ty com­pa­nies would ben­e­fit but the net ef­fect of crime would like­ly be neg­a­tive. As some busi­ness­es would al­so have to im­ple­ment new mea­sures to look af­ter their staff, safe­ty get them home and al­so run short­er shifts and there­by forego rev­enues and prof­its. It is in every­one's in­ter­ests for us to ur­gent­ly look af­ter crime and it is my hope that the State of Emer­gency pro­vides some mo­men­tum go­ing for­ward in terms or qui­et­ing the scourge of crime, par­tic­u­lar­ly vi­o­lent crime," said Joe­field, who stressed that oth­er as­pects of crime al­so im­pact­ed the econ­o­my.

He said, "But we al­so have to be mind­ful that we can't on­ly look at crime be­cause of the vi­o­lent as­pect of it be­cause white col­lar crime is al­so hurt­ful to our econ­o­my. Fraud, and some mil­lions of dol­lars that could be put to pro­duc­tive means we have to have a holis­tic view as it re­lates to crime and al­so a holis­tic view as it re­lates to the reme­dies of crime. So we have to go back to the ba­sic things, en­sur­ing peo­ple have op­por­tu­ni­ties not on­ly as it re­lates to work but op­por­tu­ni­ties for equal ac­cess to the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem."