Nadaleen Singh

The Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice (CSO) re­port­ed yes­ter­day that the over­all un­em­ploy­ment rate had in­creased from 3.5 per cent in the last quar­ter of 2015 to 3.8 per cent in the first quar­ter of 2016, based on da­ta col­lect­ed in the Con­tin­u­ous Sam­ple Sur­vey of Pop­u­la­tion con­duct­ed dur­ing the pe­ri­od Jan­u­ary to March 2016.

In its state­ment, the CSO said: "From a gen­der per­spec­tive, the un­em­ploy­ment rate among males in­creased from 3.4 per cent to 3.7 per cent. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, fe­males in­creased from 3.6 per cent to 3.8 per cent dur­ing the same pe­ri­od."

The CSO da­ta comes against the back­drop of the de­ci­sion by Arcelor­Mit­tal in March to close its doors, re­sult­ing in about 700 work­ers be­ing sent home. In Feb­ru­ary, Cen­tri­ca ter­mi­nat­ed the ser­vices of 200 work­ers and in Jan­u­ary, Rep­sol sent home 11 work­ers. As well, oth­er com­pa­nies across vary­ing sec­tors of the coun­try sent home work­ers as the con­trac­tion in T&T's econ­o­my tore in­to the bot­tom line of many com­pa­nies.

With the to­tal labour force amount­ing to 641,900 peo­ple at the end of March 2016, the CSO said the sur­vey da­ta showed a de­crease of 3,800 in the num­ber of peo­ple with jobs.

"In terms of the un­em­ploy­ment sit­u­a­tion, the da­ta re­flect­ed an in­crease of 1,800 or 8.1 per cent in the num­ber of un­em­ployed per­sons in Trinidad and To­ba­go be­tween the fourth quar­ter of 2015 and the first quar­ter of 2016," ac­cord­ing to the CSO.

The sur­vey al­so showed, ac­cord­ing to the CSO: "In com­par­i­son to the pre­vi­ous quar­ter, an analy­sis of per­sons with jobs by in­dus­try re­vealed that de­creas­es were iden­ti­fied in:

�2 Trans­port, stor­age and com­mu­ni­ca­tion 6,500 or 13.3 per cent;

�2 Oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ing (ex­clud­ing sug­ar and oil) 5,000 or 9.8 per cent;

�2 Fi­nanc­ing, in­sur­ance, re­al es­tate and busi­ness ser­vices 3,100 or 5.0 per cent; and

�2 Con­struc­tion 2,100 or 2.4 per cent.

How­ev­er, the CSO said that in­creas­es were seen in "com­mu­ni­ty, so­cial and per­son­al ser­vices" 5,800 or 2.8 per cent, "whole­sale and re­tail trade, restau­rants and ho­tels" 2,900 or 2.5 per cent and "oth­er agri­cul­ture, forestry, hunt­ing and fish­ing" 2,200 or 11.2 per cent.

Look­ing fur­ther in­to the sta­tis­tics, the amount of cit­i­zens ed­u­cat­ed in the first quar­ter of 2016 to­talled 2698 com­pared to the first quar­ter of 2015 where there were 2670 ed­u­cat­ed.

Pres­i­dent of the Down­town Own­ers and Mer­chants As­so­ci­a­tion, Gre­go­ry Aboud said even though the coun­try is in a re­ces­sion, he did not be­lieve that the sit­u­a­tion is at a chron­ic stage.

In a tele­phone in­ter­view with the T&T Guardian, Aboud said: "Giv­en the cir­cum­stances which the Gov­ern­ment is con­strained by and giv­en the cir­cum­stances of the struc­ture of this econ­o­my, it is not a worst case sce­nario. This is a very min­i­mal move­ment of over­all em­ploy­ment da­ta."

Com­par­ing T&T's econ­o­my with oth­er economies, Aboud said the da­ta is quite "pos­i­tive and en­cour­ag­ing." The ques­tion of whether T&T can sus­tain the de­clin­ing em­ploy­ment lev­els is left to be de­ter­mined, he said, adding that the T&T econ­o­my is still strong.

"The T&T econ­o­my has tremen­dous po­ten­tial in tourism par­tic­u­lar­ly in To­ba­go, but the peo­ple of To­ba­go need to un­clog some of the bot­tle­necks there, chief among them is their at­ti­tude to­ward tourism."

And as though call­ing for di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion ef­forts to be stepped up, Aboud said: "Chief among our po­ten­tial pos­i­tives is the huge­ly un­der-de­vel­oped agri­cul­ture sec­tor. The Gov­ern­ment can show its in­ter­est in this sec­tor by pro­vid­ing more mar­ket space, so the farm­ers can prop­er­ly show­case their goods to the pub­lic."

There is room for growth in the cre­ative in­dus­tries es­pe­cial­ly when it comes to im­prov­ing the stan­dard of Car­ni­val, Aboud said.