GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

The next 10 years will bring more change than the pre­vi­ous 100 years, so it would be im­por­tant for the re­gion­al busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty to po­si­tion it­self to catch this new wave of com­merce, by align­ing re­sources and strate­gies to keep bal­ance, and rid­ing the wave to shore.

So said Gre­go­ry Hill, vice pres­i­dent of Fi­nance and Cor­po­rate Ser­vices at the Caribbean De­vel­op­ment Bank (CDB), as he de­liv­ered the fea­ture ad­dress at AM­CHAM T&T’s Eco­nom­ic Out­look Fo­rum 2024, which was held at the Hy­att Re­gency on Wednes­day.

Hill said the next decade can be the surf­board that car­ries the re­gion and T&T for­ward, to cap­i­talise on the many op­por­tu­ni­ties for ex­pan­sion and ad­vance­ment that are now open­ing up.

“We are al­ready see­ing the start of these dy­nam­ic changes: re­new­able en­er­gy, quan­tum com­put­ing, nu­clear fu­sion, open AI ar­chi­tec­ture, Chat GPT, ma­chines be­hav­ing like hu­mans, the health­care rev­o­lu­tion, how peo­ple work/com­mu­ni­cate and the geopol­i­tics. But the next 10 years? We’re talk­ing about a com­plete re­boot.

“Right now, the world is in what is called the ‘5th In­dus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion’, which is all about deep­en­ing the in­te­gra­tion be­tween peo­ple, tech­nol­o­gy, and the en­vi­ron­ment. Com­pared to pre­vi­ous pe­ri­ods of tech­no­log­i­cal ex­pan­sion, it pri­ori­tis­es en­sur­ing that pro­duc­tiv­i­ty gains, are bal­anced with care for the lives of peo­ple, greater in­clu­sion of all, and the pro­tec­tion of the en­vi­ron­ment,” said Hill.

He said lever­ag­ing the tech­nol­o­gy is where he sees the po­ten­tial for CDB boost­ing T&T’s econ­o­my, based on pro­vid­ing the nec­es­sary pol­i­cy sup­port for the re­quired piv­ot­ing, strength­en­ing the knowl­edge cul­ture and in­vest­ing—“to­geth­er with our glob­al part­ners—for T&T’s fu­ture well-be­ing.”

For ex­am­ple, Hill said in­vest­ments in methanol fu­el, one of this coun­try’s recog­nised prod­ucts, will help to dri­ve the tran­si­tion away from fos­sil fu­els.

Hill al­so not­ed that the rapid ex­pan­sion of dig­i­tal pay­ments al­so of­fers op­por­tu­ni­ties for the coun­try’s mi­cro, small, and medi­um-sized en­ter­pris­es, which ac­count for a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of GDP and em­ploy­ment, to flour­ish.

Fur­ther, he stat­ed that the chang­ing glob­al mar­ket­place al­lows T&T to piv­ot to­wards a more re­silient, sus­tain­able and in­clu­sive coun­try.

This, he stat­ed, al­so aligns with a pol­i­cy man­date of CDB which is build­ing re­silient pros­per­i­ty for all.

“T&T, with its high in­come lev­els, uni­ver­sal ac­cess to ba­sic ser­vices, strong re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty, and a buoy­ant stock of for­eign re­serves, is well sit­u­at­ed to build an even more pros­per­ous econ­o­my in the com­ing years,” Hill added.

In not­ing the in­ter­est in the pro­posed, new re­gion­al fer­ry ser­vice be­tween Guyana, T&T and Bar­ba­dos, Hill said this aligns with the fact that in 2022, CDB an­nounced it would fi­nance the con­sul­tan­cy ser­vices for a study on the op­tions avail­able to es­tab­lish a new ship­ping ser­vice across Bar­ba­dos, Grena­da, Guyana, and this coun­try.