Af­ter Latin Amer­i­can Cen­tre, Ox­ford, it was a dif­fer­ent en­vi­ron­ment with the ocean all around you at Portsmouth Uni­ver­si­ty. And I was the guest of the Fac­ul­ty of Eco­nom­ics and Busi­ness so, the frame­work and con­text were a lit­tle dif­fer­ent.

And I was speak­ing about de­vel­op­ment which econ­o­mists ar­gue about, not on­ly in terms of how it can be achieved but even what it is, and, how best to mea­sure it.

From re­sources to growth to per capi­ta in­come to hu­man and in­tel­lec­tu­al cap­i­tal as well as so­cial cap­i­tal, in­no­va­tion and more, var­ied points of view are ex­pressed on this sub­ject.

Portsmouth was the lo­ca­tion of a ma­jor mil­i­tary base and though there is still a small naval pres­ence now, there is the old dock­yard, and lit­er­al­ly hun­dreds of yachts in a town that now con­tains old and new­ly con­struct­ed Portsmouth along­side each oth­er.

Its main eco­nom­ic dri­vers are the uni­ver­si­ty it­self, the health sec­tor, lo­cal gov­ern­ment bod­ies and com­merce. Portsmouth Uni­ver­si­ty has a busi­ness school, a good one, ranked num­ber three in the world, and a for­mi­da­ble de­part­ment of Eco­nom­ics.

The deputy dean of their Fac­ul­ty of Eco­nom­ics and Busi­ness, who is a Tri­ni, Prof Nigel Williams, is a Cam­bridge PhD, but al­so a grad­u­ate of Arthur Lok Jack School of Busi­ness when I was there, and a UWI grad­u­ate be­fore that, in En­gi­neer­ing.

He in­vit­ed me, and he was a most gra­cious host. I was a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ed when the time came to give my talk be­cause the au­di­ence in front of me was small. Lit­tle did I re­alise that my room was hooked up to three grad­u­ate class­es, led by three pro­fes­sors view­ing and lis­ten­ing.

Ah, tech­nol­o­gy. It was good.

I used T&T as a case study of how you man­age com­pet­ing de­mands for de­vel­op­ment, how you mea­sure achieve­ment, un­der­achieve­ment, suc­cess and fail­ure and the com­plex­i­ty of chang­ing di­rec­tion, even when what is to be done be­comes pret­ty clear be­cause of par­ti­san po­lit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions and lim­i­ta­tions.

The ques­tions and com­ments ranged from Dutch dis­ease; how much self-suf­fi­cien­cy was a re­al­is­tic as­pi­ra­tion; what the lim­i­ta­tions of self-suf­fi­cien­cy are in an in­ter­con­nect­ed world; tech­nol­o­gy ab­sorp­tion, val­ue chain evo­lu­tion and the ex­tent of in­te­gra­tion in the glob­al val­ue chain de­sir­able; and the lev­el of AI em­brace nec­es­sary not to be left be­hind in the AI-dri­ven propul­sion of eco­nom­ic com­pet­i­tive­ness and in­no­va­tion; rev­enue, ex­pen­di­ture, forex, tourism and food, and the Caribbean in the world.

I was in­spired by the en­gage­ment and in­ter­ac­tion. But I could not help think­ing, as I lay down to sleep lat­er, how in­tractable our prob­lems in Trinidad have be­come.

We are ar­gu­ing now about forex, and how to share the lim­it­ed pool, but is not the re­al so­lu­tion grow­ing the pool and align­ing pro­duc­tion and in­vest­ment to ex­port growth and forex sav­ings?

I don’t see how we can make any head­way in T&T with­out deal­ing with mur­ders, gangs, guns and crime which is like a shroud over our po­ten­tial for progress. It lim­its busi­ness growth, cit­i­zen en­joy­ment, and, qual­i­ty of life.

In ad­di­tion, how can we not ad­dress the is­sues around mak­ing it hard for busi­ness­es to start, en­tre­pre­neurs to es­tab­lish the ba­sis for vi­a­bil­i­ty, and in­vestors to nav­i­gate the hoops lead­ing to busi­ness cre­ation?

I mean sim­ple things like this, man, seem like mon­u­men­tal chal­lenges for the po­lit­i­cal di­rec­torate and the pub­lic ser­vice. What re­al­ly is the prob­lem? If we can’t curb crime, make it easy for busi­ness in­vest­ment and cre­ation, and craft poli­cies to bal­ance trade in our favour, what then is gov­ern­ment for?

We are spend­ing US$1 bil­lion on ed­u­ca­tion and 73 per cent of our 11-year-olds can’t make 50 per cent in SEA ... where is the val­ue for the mon­ey be­ing spent? We are spend­ing $.85 of 1b US on na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty and there is no curb on gangs, guns or mur­ders, so where is the val­ue?

And if the de­tec­tion rate is 12.5 per cent and the pros­e­cu­tion and con­vic­tion rate abysmal—30,000 re­ports to po­lice, 10,000 pros­e­cu­tions, 1,300 con­vic­tions! (2022) ... what progress?

And we spend $1/4 bil­lion US on agri­cul­ture and we im­port 85 per cent of what we con­sume and agri­cul­ture con­tributes one per cent to the GDP. What is the point, re­al­ly? How can you ra­tio­nal­ly ex­plain this? The struc­ture of the econ­o­my re­quires trans­for­ma­tion.

Bud­get­ing needs a dra­mat­ic over­haul. And we have to have our heads ex­am­ined on the re­sults that we get for the mon­ey that we spend. Some­thing is se­vere­ly wrong. How we gov­ern, how we bud­get, and how we spend, can­not be jus­ti­fied. Things must be done dif­fer­ent­ly to get bet­ter re­sults. It’s hard, but, it has to be done.