Trade, In­dus­try, In­vest­ments and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Min­is­ter Vas­ant Bharath says the three red flags raised by the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) in its lat­est re­port on T&T were al­ready be­ing ad­dressed by the Gov­ern­ment.Bharath said the is­sue of di­ver­si­fy­ing the econ­o­my was "not some­thing that was not known to the Gov­ern­ment," adding that the di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion process, which the IMF raised, had al­ready be­gun.

"We have al­ready start­ed the di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion process in­to the ar­eas of fi­nan­cial ser­vices, ICT, tourism, the cre­ative in­dus­tries sec­tor, agro-pro­cess­ing, down­stream in­dus­try and the mar­itime sec­tor," he said."We are well on our way to the di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion of the econ­o­my and util­i­sa­tion of rev­enue streams from those ser­vices."In its re­port, dat­ed Ju­ly 9, the IMF said a "greater de­gree of flex­i­bil­i­ty is need­ed in the for­eign ex­change sys­tem to avoid fur­ther short­ages."

The min­is­ter, how­ev­er, said he did not see any prob­lem there as the Cen­tral bank will do what is re­quired to en­sure the mat­ter was ad­dressed.The oth­er area of con­cern raised by the IMF was pub­lic ser­vice re­form.Bharath said the Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion Min­istry was al­ready look­ing at that mat­ter. But ad­mit­ting that there was still a lot of work to be done, Bharath said, "The Gov­ern­ment ought to be con­grat­u­lat­ed for man­ag­ing the econ­o­my in the man­ner in which it has over the last four years."

Asked to re­spond to the IMF's sug­ges­tion that "time is draw­ing near for pol­i­cy tight­en­ing," Bharath said that re­lat­ed to the sit­u­a­tion where there was al­most full em­ploy­ment and a sig­nif­i­cant amount of cred­it avail­able.Ac­cord­ing to Bharath, this can cause run­away in­fla­tion if it was not man­aged prop­er­ly."So they are look­ing at mon­e­tary pol­i­cy to look at tight­en­ing cash flows and flows of cash in­to the econ­o­my," he added.

Bharath said in the past the Cen­tral Bank had stepped in to mop up ex­cess liq­uid­i­ty in the sys­tem. He said the is­sue of the IMF im­pos­ing struc­tur­al ad­just­ment mea­sures on T&T does not arise, as the coun­try re­mained "ex­treme­ly cash-rich at this point in time."The IMF had al­so point­ed to in­creased growth for the econ­o­my, Bharath said, not­ing that such re­ports were a nor­mal process. He said the fact that the IMF was com­ment­ing on the econ­o­my "is ac­tu­al­ly a good thing."