With the 2025 bud­get date set for Sep­tem­ber 30, EY’s re­gion­al ex­ec­u­tive chair­man, Wade George, says T&T faced some chal­lenges this year, so the coun­try will prob­a­bly record a deficit giv­en the tra­jec­to­ry and pric­ing in the oil and gas sec­tor and the pro­duc­tion is­sues that T&T face.

Speak­ing fol­low­ing the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce’s Spe­cial Eco­nom­ic Zone (SEZ) con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, George said an ini­tia­tive such as the SEZ, where the pri­vate sec­tor is cat­alyzed to in­vest fur­ther in­to the econ­o­my, is an im­por­tant one. He said he would like to see more in terms of fa­cil­i­ta­tion of in­vest­ments and the cre­ation of an en­abling en­vi­ron­ment in the coun­try.

He em­pha­sised that there is need for in­vestor con­fi­dence and for the pri­vate sec­tor to step up and make their con­tri­bu­tion by cre­at­ing in­come, jobs and in­fra­struc­ture.

Al­so com­ment­ing was T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce pres­i­dent Ki­ran Ma­haraj who said the cham­ber def­i­nite­ly wants to see some em­pha­sis on in­cen­tives, es­pe­cial­ly about tax­es.

“I think that the for­ma­tion of the SEZ will pro­vide some of the an­swers that we’re look­ing for. In terms of T&T as a des­ti­na­tion for busi­ness, we need to en­sure that our for­eign di­rect in­vest­ment (FDI) gets back to where we want it to be. If you look at the World Bank’s re­port about for­eign di­rect in­vest­ment as a per­cent­age of GDP, we are in the neg­a­tive as of the end of 2022 as com­pared to our Caribbean neigh­bours,” said Ma­haraj.

“It’s one of the ar­eas that we know there needs to be some con­fi­dence. So we’ve made some sug­ges­tions for some re­struc­tur­ing and con­sid­er­a­tions can be giv­en to help cat­alyze the eco­nom­ic growth that we want to see,” she ex­plained.

Ma­haraj be­lieves that look­ing at some of the past rec­om­men­da­tions giv­en to the Gov­ern­ment by the T&T Cham­ber would be use­ful.

“So we are hope­ful that the min­is­ter and the oth­er min­istries would have looked at it. But we know that there needs to be an em­pha­sis on small and medi­um en­ter­pris­es but in dif­fer­ent ways. It’s very good to give out grants and to have grant fund­ing, but you know for a lot of mi­cro and small busi­ness­es in par­tic­u­lar, grant mon­ey doesn’t go very far. There needs to be some oth­er con­sid­er­a­tions. So, for con­sid­er­a­tions of how we main­tain sus­tain­abil­i­ty, es­pe­cial­ly through ca­pac­i­ty-build­ing ef­forts, we have to look at the so­cial fab­ric,” she said.