Ky­ron Reg­is

ky­ron.reg­is@guardian.co.tt

The Cen­tral Bank of Trinidad and To­ba­go (CBTT) lat­est Mon­e­tary Re­port has ex­plained that T&T’s econ­o­my can be fur­ther stim­u­lat­ed if there is an end to the in­ter­rup­tion of nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion.

The re­port read: “eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty could im­prove in the lat­ter part of 2019 if there is a nor­mal­i­sa­tion of nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion fol­low­ing tem­po­rary dis­rup­tions at mid-year.”

The bank ex­pressed that the Min­istry of En­er­gy ex­pects a rise in nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion to around 3.8 bil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet per day (bcf/d), which would aid the re­ju­ve­na­tion of down­stream re­fin­ing and strength­en the pro­duc­tion of petro­chem­i­cals.

Ac­cord­ing to the re­port, the do­mes­tic en­er­gy sec­tor ex­pe­ri­enced set­backs in the sec­ond quar­ter of 2019. It said: “Nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion fell pri­mar­i­ly due to pro­duc­tion cur­tail­ments at At­lantic LNG which is a ma­jor user of nat­ur­al gas.”

The CBTT con­tend­ed that LNG pro­duc­tion, which was in­ter­rupt­ed in June by main­te­nance ac­tiv­i­ty and pow­er out­ages at the At­lantic LNG fa­cil­i­ty, is like­ly to nor­malise in the sec­ond half of 2019.

The re­port not­ed, how­ev­er, that the petro­chem­i­cals sub-sec­tor ex­pe­ri­enced a boost in the pro­duc­tion of am­mo­nia and urea, which large­ly rep­re­sent­ed a re­cov­ery from sig­nif­i­cant down­time in the com­pa­ra­ble pe­ri­od in 2018.

En­er­gy and en­er­gy-based com­pa­nies, ac­cord­ing to the CBTT are con­tin­u­ing to ra­tio­nal­ize their op­er­a­tions in the face of in­creas­ing glob­al com­pe­ti­tion while the Point-a-Pierre re­fin­ery op­er­a­tions have not yet restart­ed.

The high­er en­er­gy rev­enues T&T re­ceived in the 2018/19 fi­nan­cial year, meant the coun­try reg­is­tered a low­er deficit than in 2017/18, said the CBTT. It al­so ex­plained that to­tal rev­enue was high­er in the 2018/19 fi­nan­cial year be­cause of im­proved en­er­gy rev­enue.

Out­side of the en­er­gy sec­tor, the CBTT re­port added that end-of-year sea­son­al de­mand is ex­pect­ed to boost dis­tri­b­u­tion, “while the ac­cel­er­a­tion in the pace of im­ple­men­ta­tion of Gov­ern­ment in­fra­struc­ture works will spill over in­to con­struc­tion ac­tiv­i­ty.”

The CBTT said that the re­sponse of pri­vate in­vest­ment will be key to de­ter­min­ing how fast the non-en­er­gy econ­o­my re­cov­ers. Ac­cord­ing to pre­lim­i­nary es­ti­mates by the CBTT for the first half of 2019, ac­tiv­i­ty re­mained mod­er­ate in the non-en­er­gy sec­tor while ac­tiv­i­ty de­clined in sev­er­al cru­cial sub-sec­tors such as man­u­fac­tur­ing and con­struc­tion.

The re­port not­ed that the dis­tri­b­u­tion sub-sec­tor was al­most flat but there was an im­prove­ment in ac­tiv­i­ty in the fi­nan­cial sec­tor dur­ing the pe­ri­od of the re­port.

The CBTT re­port said: “Over­all, un­lock­ing the po­ten­tial of the non-en­er­gy sec­tors via struc­tur­al re­forms that en­hance the ease of do­ing busi­ness, re­duce ad­min­is­tra­tive and oth­er bot­tle­necks to in­vest­ment, and en­gen­der more flex­i­bil­i­ty in mar­ket re­spons­es to glob­al com­pe­ti­tion will go a long way to fos­ter­ing durable growth.”