Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor—News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

Econ­o­mist and for­mer in­de­pen­dent sen­a­tor Am­ri­ta De­onar­ine says con­cerns about min­istries which re­ceive large al­lo­ca­tions, such as the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry and the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­istry, but which are per­ceived to be hav­ing lit­tle im­pact is a valid one for the pop­u­la­tion.

De­onar­ine, who served in the Sen­ate be­tween 2018 and 2023 and ap­peared on CNC3’s The Big In­ter­view pro­gramme last night, said a “clear ex­pla­na­tion” needs to be giv­en go­ing for­ward about how much of the monies al­lo­cat­ed is go­ing to­wards re­cur­rent ex­pen­di­ture and what is go­ing to­wards de­vel­op­men­tal ex­pen­di­ture.

She said, “I do not be­lieve we should be cut­ting back, but at the same time we need some sort of trans­paren­cy as to why we have not been see­ing, or the en­tire pop­u­la­tion have not been reap­ing ben­e­fits from this ad­di­tion­al in­vest­ment in­to both the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry and al­so the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty.”

Last year, the Health Min­istry re­ceived the biggest slice of the bud­get at $6.4 bil­lion. The Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry re­ceived 6.1 bil­lion while the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­istry was al­lo­cat­ed $2.7 bil­lion.

Last year’s bud­get al­so pro­posed a to­tal rev­enue of $54 bil­lion and a to­tal ex­pen­di­ture of $59.2 bil­lion, with a deficit of $5.197 bil­lion.

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert, will to­day de­liv­er his tenth na­tion­al bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion.

De­onar­ine said since 2015 to the present, the econ­o­my has been un­der­go­ing “fis­cal con­sol­i­da­tion,” which is cut­ting ex­pen­di­ture and try­ing to man­age less rev­enue.

Last Fri­day, UNC leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, crit­i­cised the Dr Kei­th Row­ley-led Gov­ern­ment for dip­ping in­to the Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund (HSF) ten times over the last nine years.

De­onar­ine said while the HSF is one con­tin­gency plan, it should on­ly be looked at as a con­tin­gency plan for the short term.

She said it can­not be ig­nored how im­por­tant the buffers of the HSF were dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, not­ing that as a re­sult of this, T&T was not hit as hard as oth­er coun­tries. She said the pub­lic debt could have been a lot high­er than what it is right now (as of the sec­ond quar­ter for 2024 it stood at 74 per cent of GDP) had it not been for the HSF buffer.

She said the cost of liv­ing is al­so set to be a key theme to look out for dur­ing the min­is­ter’s pre­sen­ta­tion to­day. De­onar­ine said the im­pact of high­er food prices on house­holds across the coun­try is due to their in­come lev­els be­ing very low. She re­called two bud­gets ago when the Fi­nance Min­is­ter an­nounced an in­crease in the in­come tax thresh­old which was set to ben­e­fit 300,000 peo­ple in the labour force. She al­so not­ed the in­crease in min­i­mum wage last year which ben­e­fit­ed 190,000 peo­ple.

“Bear in mind our labour force is 609,000 per­sons, so if you run the num­bers, you would see that re­al­ly and tru­ly, less than 20 per cent of the labour force is earn­ing a salary above $7,500 and that is a cause for con­cern,” De­onar­ine ex­plained.

She al­so ques­tioned the method­ol­o­gy be­ing used to cal­cu­late in­fla­tion. Sta­tis­tics show in­fla­tion has de­creased from 8.5 per cent in 2022.

“The in­fla­tion method­ol­o­gy that is used right now is based on an out­dat­ed bas­ket of goods based on a house­hold bud­getary sur­vey way back in 2008, so I think there is some un­der-rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the true lev­el of in­fla­tion in the coun­try, and there­fore, this is why we see this sort of mis­match be­tween the met­rics that are be­ing giv­en and what we are hear­ing from the pub­lic.” De­onar­ine said it al­so needs to be con­sid­ered that the wages of the labour force are on the low­er end.

She said the Gov­ern­ment must al­so take in­to con­sid­er­a­tion the chal­lenges the non-en­er­gy man­u­fac­tur­ing and pri­vate sec­tors are fac­ing and come up with so­lu­tions.

She ex­plained, “What we need to do is cre­ate jobs. We know the pub­lic sec­tor can­not cre­ate those jobs be­cause they al­ready have a very fat pub­lic sec­tor wage bill. We need to en­cour­age the pri­vate sec­tor to cre­ate those jobs, but is the pri­vate sec­tor in­cen­tivised to do so?

“We need to un­der­stand what are the chal­lenges that they are fac­ing if we are to ex­pect them to ex­pand growth and cre­ate jobs. We need to un­der­stand the busi­ness en­vi­ron­ment that they are deal­ing with and ad­dress those chal­lenges to get to a point where we can see mean­ing­ful growth tak­ing place.”

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Im­bert is sched­uled to de­liv­er the bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion at 1.30 pm to­day.