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Friday, July 11, 2025

COVID-19 will have potentially devastating economic impact

by

Kyron Regis
1945 days ago
20200314
Economist Dr Indera Sagewan advises Government, not only to maintain expenditure, but to consider repositioning where the spending occurs.

Economist Dr Indera Sagewan advises Government, not only to maintain expenditure, but to consider repositioning where the spending occurs.

GUARDIAN

The Covid-19 out­break has had dev­as­tat­ing ef­fects on the world econ­o­my and if the virus’ im­pacts are in­ten­si­fied - it can mean neg­a­tive glob­al growth for the first quar­ter of 2020.

This ac­cord­ing to Dr In­dera Sage­wan, who was cit­ing da­ta from the Or­gan­i­sa­tion for Eco­nom­ic Co-op­er­a­tion and De­vel­op­ment (OECD).

Speak­ing at a Busi­ness Lun­cheon host­ed by the Ship­ping As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T, Sage­wan said: “There’s the an­tic­i­pa­tion that if the pan­dem­ic wors­ens, glob­al growth can fall to 1.5 per cent.”

Ac­cord­ing to the OECD, this virus presents the biggest dan­ger to the glob­al econ­o­my since the fi­nan­cial cri­sis of 2009 and is pro­ject­ed to cause a slow­down in glob­al growth to un­der two per cent.

Sage­wan said this means that the world econ­o­my will be pushed in­to a glob­al re­ces­sion. She said the glob­al econ­o­my was bor­der­ing on re­ces­sion in 2019 with a growth rate of 2.9 per cent but the an­tic­i­pa­tion was that pos­i­tive growth would have re­versed the out­comes of re­ces­sion in 2020.

How­ev­er, Sage­wan as­sert­ed: “Now what we are see­ing in 2020 that is go­ing to be wors­ened, in fact, there’s an an­tic­i­pa­tion that there is go­ing to be neg­a­tive growth in the first quar­ter of 2020.”

Sage­wan as­sert­ed that this dis­rupts sup­ply chains, es­pe­cial­ly with coun­tries that are tied to Chi­na - and the en­tire world, in terms of pro­duc­tion, is tied to Chi­na. She high­light­ed that the nov­el coro­n­avirus has had a crip­pling im­pact on trade.

Al­so speak­ing at the event was Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port, Ro­han Sinanan, who said that the gov­ern­ment is mon­i­tor­ing the de­vel­op­ments as it re­lat­ed to Covid-19.

He said: “We are pre­pared and have tak­en all prac­ti­cal steps, for ex­am­ple sus­pend­ing the ar­rival of cruise ships to our shores.”

Sinanan said that the gov­ern­ment cares about the cit­i­zens of T&T, nonethe­less, he ex­pressed that some of the de­ci­sions made will af­fect the ship­ping in­dus­try. He in­di­cat­ed: “at the end of the day, we have a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to pro­tect the cit­i­zens of this coun­try.”

The Min­is­ter ad­mit­ted that there are chal­lenges in the in­dus­try, in ar­eas like the yacht­ing sec­tor. He con­tin­ued: “A lot of our ports are not se­cured the way we would like to see them se­cured - this is go­ing to be a chal­leng­ing time for us as a coun­try.”

The Min­is­ter al­so an­nounced that the coun­try is at the fi­nal stage of ac­quir­ing an in­ter­na­tion­al con­sul­tan­cy firm to build T&T’s mar­itime in­dus­try.

He not­ed that the con­sul­tant would be com­ing in­to T&T next month.


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