One renowned econ­o­mist be­lieves there is a need for more sus­tain­able jobs in or­der to en­sure a healthy Trinidad and To­ba­go econ­o­my.

Ac­cord­ing to Pro­fes­sor Roger Ho­sein, these jobs can be cre­at­ed by, and in, both the pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tors.

He be­lieves that short-term work pro­grammes are used as po­lit­i­cal tools and have no true sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

Speak­ing on CNC3's The Morn­ing Brew show to­day, Pro­fes­sor Ho­sein said banks can do more to as­sist in job cre­ation by in­creas­ing the num­ber of busi­ness loans.

He used the E-Teck Park as an ex­am­ple of how a sus­tain­able job cre­ation pro­gramme could be fa­cil­i­tat­ed.

“What we need to do is to cre­ate long-term, sus­tain­able jobs,” he said. “That’s where we are not see­ing enough trac­tion and enough changes. That’s where I think the E-Teck Park and the pri­vate sec­tor could play a greater role. That’s where the com­mer­cial banks could play a big­ger role. What we see from com­mer­cial banks is an in­crease in loans for mort­gages and for the pur­chas­ing of cars. The con­se­quence, in my un­der­stand­ing of the da­ta, is that there is a par­tial skew­ing in the size of the trade­able sec­tor in re­la­tion to the non-trade­able sec­tor.”

Pro­fes­sor Ho­sein says the cre­ation of sus­tain­able em­ploy­ment to meet the de­mands of the labour mar­ket is an is­sue this coun­try must ad­dress.

He says a strong labour force can gen­er­ate for­eign ex­change.

“It is clear that as the labour force par­tic­i­pa­tion rate falls, eco­nom­ic growth falls,” he ex­plained. “If you have few­er peo­ple work­ing and we are gen­er­at­ing less out­put and the labour force par­tic­i­pa­tion rate is on the de­cline, it is very pos­si­ble that over­all eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty could fall.”

“That’s why the Min­is­ter of Labour should be right at the fore­front fight­ing for change and de­vel­op­ment,” he ar­gues, “and push­ing for­ward eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty in this coun­try … You hard­ly hear him.”

And the renowned econ­o­mist be­lieves the gen­der gap in the work­force can be at­trib­uted to women not re­turn­ing to the work af­ter the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, as well as to some of them hav­ing mi­grat­ed to work from home sys­tems.

To in­crease the num­ber of women en­ter­ing the work­force, he rec­om­mends af­ter school care pro­grams for chil­dren.