To­day, Fri­day 2 Sep­tem­ber 2022, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert MP will de­liv­er the Gov­ern­ment's “Spot­light on the Econ­o­my” 2022 State­ment.

Those in the busi­ness sec­tor are hop­ing Min­is­ter Im­bert can bring good news.

Re­cent­ly in an in­ter­view on CNC3's The Morn­ing Brew, Chair­man of the Con­fed­er­a­tion of Re­gion­al Busi­ness Cham­bers, Vivek Char­ran, re­vealed that one of the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty's biggest fears is in­fla­tion.

“We’ve been say­ing that as it is glob­al­ly that in­fla­tion could lead in­ex­orably to a re­ces­sion, and we don’t want to get there,” Vivek Char­ran stat­ed.

“We ex­pect to see the Min­is­ter high­light some pos­i­tives.  We are go­ing to see some in­crease in GDP, and an in­crease in in­come com­ing in from the en­er­gy sec­tor be­cause of the rise in oil prices and gas prices as a re­sult of the war in Ukraine with Rus­sia, which has cre­at­ed a boom in en­er­gy prices and rev­enues,” he ob­served.

The CR­BC chair­man notes that in the non-en­er­gy sec­tor, they do not ex­pect to hear of tremen­dous growth, es­pe­cial­ly giv­en the chal­lenges faced over the past cou­ple of years with the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

“In the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor, cer­tain ex­ports have been on the rise, but ba­si­cal­ly, for many of the SMEs in the non-man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor of Trinidad and To­ba­go, we’re still climb­ing out of the pan­dem­ic and still un­der pres­sure,” he said.

Chair­man of the To­ba­go Busi­ness Cham­ber, Mar­tin George, says there must be a con­cert­ed ef­fort to make do­ing busi­ness eas­i­er in this coun­try, re­gard­less of the size of the busi­ness.

“On the glob­al Ease of Do­ing Busi­ness In­dex, we are very low down on the totem pole,” he points out, not­ing the run-around and bu­reau­cra­cy in­volved in try­ing to get busi­ness­es reg­is­tered, among oth­er re­lat­ed busi­ness mat­ters.

Ac­cord­ing to Mar­tin George, get­ting rid of those ob­sta­cles and un­nec­es­sary bu­reau­cra­cy will go a long way to­ward re­duc­ing cor­rup­tion in the sys­tem.

“We in Trinidad and To­ba­go need to start mak­ing sure we stop cre­at­ing the en­vi­ron­ment for cor­rup­tion to thrive,” he ar­gues.  “If we don’t, it will be­come so en­dem­ic and clog up the sys­tem, and le­git­i­mate busi­ness sim­ply won’t get done.”

Vivek Cha­ran is hop­ing to hear from Gov­ern­ment there will be some form of eco­nom­ic stim­u­lus pack­age when the 2023 Bud­get is fi­nal­ly pre­sent­ed.

“One is­sue is that it has been very dif­fi­cult for SMEs to get com­mer­cial bank ac­counts,” he points out.  “Many le­git­i­mate small busi­ness­es face ma­jor chal­lenges when they go to the banks and try to open com­mer­cial bank ac­counts.  This is forc­ing some SMEs to go in­to the in­for­mal sec­tor to ac­cess fi­nanc­ing, which we don’t want.  These peo­ple are caught be­tween a rock and a hard place.”

Vivek Cha­ran points to what he says is a dis­turb­ing trend—small com­mer­cial ac­counts are be­ing closed down by some banks be­cause not enough cash is flow­ing through them.

“We are try­ing to steer our mem­bers to­wards those banks that are eas­i­er to es­tab­lish com­mer­cial ac­counts with and do busi­ness with,” he said.