Raphael John-Lall

Econ­o­mists all agree that the Gov­ern­ment must roll out an ef­fec­tive in­dus­tri­al pol­i­cy if it is to cre­ate sus­tain­able jobs and a grow­ing econ­o­my.

Fol­low­ing the Ibis Steel Com­pa­ny’s launch last week and the promise of al­most 1,000 jobs if the com­pa­ny agrees to an ex­pan­sion, econ­o­mist Dr Vanus James told the Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian it is not a “mat­ter of op­ti­mism or pes­simism,” but the his­to­ry of T&T’s in­dus­tri­al de­vel­op­ment shows that pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ments made er­rors in how they at­tempt­ed to in­dus­tri­alise the econ­o­my.

“From the records of 70 years, in­clud­ing Point Lisas, these en­er­gy sec­tor in­dus­tri­al projects might help if they can be un­der­tak­en com­pet­i­tive­ly but they will not solve the deep prob­lems of large num­bers of un­der­e­d­u­cat­ed and un­der­em­ployed work­ers aris­ing from the en­clave econ­o­my we have been op­er­at­ing. Both the Com­mu­ni­ty-Based En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion and En­hance­ment Pro­gramme (CEPEP) and Un­em­ploy­ment Re­lief Pro­gramme (URP) ac­tu­al­ly tes­ti­fy to that. They were sup­posed to be hold­ing pat­terns to be phased out by di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion. The en­er­gy-based in­dus­tri­al ef­fort did not, and could not, de­liv­er. We were sim­ply not di­ver­si­fy­ing in an in­formed way.”

Ibis Steel is a sub­sidiary of US-based met­als and in­dus­tri­al in­vest­ment com­pa­ny, Pin­na­cle Steel and Vana­di­um Cor­po­ra­tion.

Pin­na­cle’s chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer, Ed­win Ben­nett, said the com­pa­ny’s ini­tial in­vest­ment is planned at US$250 mil­lion and it pro­pos­es to cre­ate 350 jobs dur­ing the restart of the fa­cil­i­ty and 500 full-time jobs.

This comes at a time when there are con­cerns among dif­fer­ent sec­tors of the pop­u­la­tion that the un­em­ploy­ment rate has been grow­ing.

The Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice’s (CSO) lat­est Labour Force Sur­vey showed that the num­ber of em­ployed peo­ple fell by al­most 6,000 be­tween the fourth quar­ter of 2025 and the first quar­ter of 2026.

For­mer min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Fi­nance, Bri­an Man­ning said last week that T&T’s eco­nom­ic woes are com­pound­ed by the clo­sure of the CEPEP and URP pro­grammes that pro­vid­ed crit­i­cal em­ploy­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties for vul­ner­a­ble com­mu­ni­ties.

James said high-end in­dus­tri­al jobs will fill the vac­u­um, but the sec­tors that can de­liv­er are the ones that demon­stra­bly em­body the coun­try’s dy­nam­ic com­par­a­tive ad­van­tages and in­no­v­a­tive ca­pac­i­ties.

He added thatit is im­por­tant to match skills to what­ev­er new in­dus­tries the Gov­ern­ment is plan­ning.

“The record shows that they (work­ers) are dis­placed when the gov­ern­ment fo­cus­es the strat­e­gy on the en­er­gy en­clave. These ad­van­ta­geous sec­tors are the sec­tors that re­ly on high lev­els of ed­u­ca­tion and re­lat­ed skills, and a high speed of learn­ing to pro­duce ex­portable out­put.”

He said ed­u­ca­tion, health­care, fi­nan­cial ser­vices, oth­er pro­fes­sion­al ser­vices and the cre­ative in­dus­tries are sec­tors that can of­fer sus­tain­able em­ploy­ment.

“Your main chal­lenge here is that these are main­ly owned and con­trolled by an au­thor­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ment. They can learn fast and ex­port com­pet­i­tive­ly if we know what we are do­ing but have been fo­cused on ser­vic­ing the do­mes­tic mar­ket and will re­main so un­til we break the bonds of au­thor­i­tar­i­an­ism at all lev­els - the home, the schools, the po­lit­i­cal par­ties and the gov­ern­ment, per­haps start­ing with the lat­ter two.”

When asked if T&T’s Gross Do­mes­tic Prod­uct (GDP) growth is ex­pand­ing quick­ly enough to gen­er­ate the types of jobs the econ­o­my needs, James said the prob­lem is not eco­nom­ic growth.

“Sure­ly, but to do so, we must first solve the prob­lem iden­ti­fied…au­thor­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ment and pol­i­tics. Our prob­lem is not eco­nom­ic ex­pan­sion, as the record demon­strates. We’ve had many bouts of that, from sug­ar to en­er­gy. What we’ve nev­er had is growth with di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion.”

He said sus­tain­able eco­nom­ic growth will solve not on­ly un­em­ploy­ment but some of the na­tion’s oth­er prob­lems like the short­age of for­eign ex­change.

“This is the re­al test - what the facts of the coun­try and the re­gion sug­gest is the way to cre­ate sus­tain­able jobs that ex­ploit the coun­try’s ad­van­tages, ad­dress the for­eign ex­change con­straints and lead to sus­tain­able growth with de­vel­op­ment.”

Skills train­ing

Econ­o­mist Dr Ronald Ramkissoon told the Busi­ness Guardian that there needs to be skills train­ing for the un­em­ployed who wish to ac­cess some of these new open­ings in the in­dus­tri­al sec­tor.

“If low­er in­come per­sons are to ben­e­fit from the an­nounced large in­dus­tri­al projects, then ap­pro­pri­ate skills train­ing must be high up on the agen­da of gov­ern­ment and the pri­vate sec­tor. In oth­er words, plan­ning for the tran­si­tion pe­ri­od is crit­i­cal. Hope­ful­ly, pol­i­cy­mak­ers are so en­gaged.”

He added that the in­dus­tri­al projects an­nounced by the Gov­ern­ment will gen­er­ate both high­er skilled and low­er skilled jobs.

“The projects in them­selves are like­ly to hire few­er per­sons with spe­cif­ic high-end skills in­clud­ing en­gi­neers, etc. Low­er end jobs are like­ly to arise from the con­struc­tion phase and from some an­cil­lary-type sup­port ser­vices. For ex­am­ple, cater­ing and re­tail busi­ness­es in the Point Lisas area, in par­tic­u­lar, are like­ly ben­e­fi­cia­ries.”

He made it clear that if the Gov­ern­ment is to grow the econ­o­my and cre­ate jobs, it must be able to clear the bot­tle­necks that have stunt­ed growth over the last few decades.

“As far as wealth and job cre­ation are con­cerned, I have no doubt that this coun­try can do far bet­ter than it is do­ing now. If the in­ten­tion of pol­i­cy­mak­ers is to gen­er­ate faster, sus­tain­able and in­clu­sive eco­nom­ic growth, then they must recog­nise that such growth is much hard­er to achieve if con­strained by cor­rup­tion, crime, mis­trust of gov­ern­ment and eth­nic strife. This has been proven glob­al­ly as the mul­ti­lat­er­al in­sti­tu­tions, some of which are based here, would at­test to.”

Econ­o­mist Dr An­tho­ny Gon­za­les told the Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian that he be­lieves that un­em­ploy­ment has been ris­ing due to the clo­sure of sev­er­al plants, the erad­i­ca­tion or re­duc­tion of many make-work gov­ern­ment jobs as URP, CEPEP and the de­cline in con­sumer de­mand.

“We do not have the cor­rect num­bers, but I sus­pect that the num­ber of un­em­ployed is sig­nif­i­cant­ly larg­er than the jobs now be­ing cre­at­ed in Point Lisas in the short to medi­um term. So, while the jobs be­ing cre­at­ed by the re­vival of the steel plant will help, this and even some of the oth­er plant es­tab­lish­ments men­tioned for the medi­um term will not make a se­ri­ous dent in­to the lev­el of un­em­ploy­ment. It will take siz­ably more eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty to do so.”