The Arthur Lok Jack Glob­al School of Busi­ness (ALJGSB) and the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce have an­nounced the rein­tro­duc­tion of the na­tion­al busi­ness sen­ti­ment sur­vey, for­mer­ly known as the cor­po­rate con­fi­dence in­dex.

In a news re­lease yes­ter­day, the two bod­ies said the ini­tia­tive has been re­designed and re­launched as T&T’s busi­ness out­look, re­flect­ing a broad­er and more dy­nam­ic ap­proach to cap­tur­ing pri­vate sec­tor per­spec­tives in to­day’s evolv­ing eco­nom­ic land­scape.

It ex­plained the busi­ness out­look is now a bian­nu­al sur­vey that would de­liv­er time­ly, da­ta-dri­ven in­sights in­to the cur­rent and pro­ject­ed out­look of the na­tion­al busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty.

Draw­ing on in­put from com­pa­nies across sec­tors, it would serve as a crit­i­cal tool for in­form­ing pub­lic pol­i­cy, pri­vate sec­tor strat­e­gy and na­tion­al eco­nom­ic plan­ning.

The re­lease fur­ther ex­plained this up­dat­ed ver­sion builds on the foun­da­tion of the orig­i­nal cor­po­rate con­fi­dence in­dex—first con­cep­tu­alised and im­ple­ment­ed in the ear­ly 2000s un­der the lead­er­ship of the cham­ber’s cur­rent CEO, Vashti Guyadeen, dur­ing her tenure as head of busi­ness re­search at the UWI-In­sti­tute of Busi­ness.

The new frame­work brings sharp­er rel­e­vance and for­ward-look­ing in­di­ca­tors, aligned to the re­al­i­ties of to­day’s busi­ness en­vi­ron­ment.

“Ac­cu­rate and time­ly da­ta are the foun­da­tion of ef­fec­tive ad­vo­ca­cy, and the T&T Busi­ness Out­look will en­able us to speak with clar­i­ty and pur­pose on be­half of the busi­ness sec­tor as well as em­pow­er our busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty with cred­i­ble in­sights that re­flect both con­fi­dence lev­els and op­er­a­tional re­al­i­ties.

“At a time when un­cer­tain­ty is the on­ly cer­tain­ty, this in­dex will help firms bench­mark them­selves, iden­ti­fy emerg­ing risks and op­por­tu­ni­ties, and more im­por­tant­ly, shape the na­tion­al con­ver­sa­tion on com­pet­i­tive­ness and pri­vate sec­tor-led growth,” Guyadeen said.

Mar­i­ano Browne, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the Arthur Lok Jack Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness al­so not­ed that mul­ti­lat­er­al in­sti­tu­tions have iden­ti­fied the broad chal­lenges in­ter­na­tion­al­ly to world eco­nom­ic growth, but T&T’s busi­ness­es need to point pol­i­cy mak­ers to spe­cif­ic mea­sures to ad­dress the do­mes­tic sit­u­a­tion.

This part­ner­ship be­tween acad­e­mia and in­dus­try un­der­scores a shared com­mit­ment to fos­ter­ing an in­formed, re­silient, and com­pet­i­tive busi­ness ecosys­tem in T&T.

The link to the sur­vey can be found at: https://www.sur­vey­mon­key.com/r/HQH9393