Kim­ber­ly Mack­han

It is an ex­cel­lent bud­get. This was the com­ment of Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning, min­utes af­ter the bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion at the Red House in Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day. He said he was "very sat­is­fied."

Man­ning be­lieved that enough was de­liv­ered to the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go in the 2009/2010 bud­get. "Yes, in the con­text of the eco­nom­ic cir­cum­stances of the world and in T&T, I think we have done quite well," he said. Man­ning said it was nec­es­sary to pred­i­cate the Gov­ern­ment's fis­cal pack­age for the next year on con­ser­v­a­tive prices for oil and gas of US$55 per bar­rel and a gas price of US$2.75 per mil­lion cu­bic feet. "We tried to be very re­al­is­tic to see what is hap­pen­ing in the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket," he said. "It is al­ways dif­fi­cult to pre­dict these things, but we sought to do just that and we were very con­ser­v­a­tive and we were go­ing on the side of cau­tion."

Over the last year, re­duced en­er­gy prices prompt­ed more than one bud­get re­vi­sion from the Gov­ern­ment, along with its state-ex­pen­di­ture plans.

The price of oil has since re­cov­ered to reach at least US$70 per bar­rel up from a low of US$40, but gas prices con­tin­ued on a down­ward spi­ral to US$2.76 for each mil­lion cu­bic feet, its low­est price since 2002.