Mar­keters are al­ways on the look­out for op­por­tu­ni­ties. They of­ten ask if there is a dif­fer­ent way to seg­ment the mar­ket. Can we find hid­den op­por­tu­ni­ties in a mar­ket space that is ne­glect­ed? Are our com­peti­tors ex­plor­ing ar­eas that we have ig­nored? One seg­men­ta­tion cri­te­ri­on fre­quent­ly missed in busi­ness mar­ket­ing is whether the firm can be clas­si­fied de­mo­graph­i­cal­ly as a fam­i­ly en­ter­prise. This recog­ni­tion has the po­ten­tial to open doors in­to an­oth­er mar­ket space.

And it is be­lieved that the re­cent­ly launched Nat­ur­al Cap­i­tal Grant Chal­lenge 2023 is one of the key steps in im­prov­ing T&T’s stand­ing in that re­gard.

Last week Wednes­day night, the Val­u­a­tion of Land (Amend­ment) Bill 2023 was vot­ed on, and ap­proved, by a 18 to 14 ma­jor­i­ty in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, bring­ing T&T one step clos­er to the rein­tro­duc­tion of a tax on prop­er­ty, which was stopped in 2009.

If you are on­ly pick­ing this, the third in­stall­ment, it may be worth your time to look for the last two copies of the Busi­ness Guardian. The feed­back from these two columns has been quite en­cour­ag­ing which has prompt­ed me to con­tin­ue.

An 11-year dis­pute be­tween T&T’s Au­di­tor Gen­er­al’s De­part­ment and its pre­mier tax col­lec­tion agency–the In­land Rev­enue Di­vi­sion, al­so called the Board of In­land Rev­enue–re­sult­ed in $36.52 bil­lion in rev­enue col­lect­ed by the BIR in the 2022 fis­cal year not be­ing au­dit­ed.

The lo­cal fash­ion in­dus­try con­tin­ues to make sig­nif­i­cant strides in show­cas­ing T&T’s tal­ent and, more im­por­tant­ly, prov­ing to be a po­ten­tial eco­nom­ic growth pole.

The lift­ing of the pan­dem­ic re­stric­tions of 2022 led to an in­crease in eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty in T&T, with some sec­tors see­ing a re­bound al­though this resur­gence was not as strong as the per­for­mance in the pre-pan­dem­ic pe­ri­od of the econ­o­my, ac­cord­ing to eco­nom­ics lec­tur­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) Dr Re­gan De­o­nanan.

Trinidad and To­ba­go and Chile yes­ter­day com­menced the fourth round of ne­go­ti­a­tions for a Par­tial Scope Trade Agree­ment be­tween the two coun­tries.

More than 135 re­gion­al mi­cro-small-and medi­um-sized en­ter­pris­es (MSMEs) re­ceived over US$2.1 mil­lion in fund­ing to boost their busi­ness­es last year, the Caribbean Ex­port De­vel­op­ment Agency (Caribbean Ex­port) has re­vealed in its 2022 an­nu­al re­port.

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert said on Wednes­day that four Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment bod­ies in Trinidad could col­lect up to $198 mil­lion in prop­er­ty tax­es a year when all prop­er­ties in those cor­po­ra­tions have been val­ued us­ing the an­nu­al rental val­u­a­tion method­ol­o­gy.

The Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion’s (UTC) net in­come for its 2022 fi­nan­cial year was $52 mil­lion, a dip of $20 mil­lion or 27.7 per cent from its 2021 in­come, ac­cord­ing to the cor­po­ra­tion’s 2022 an­nu­al re­port.

Econ­o­mist and re­tired di­rec­tor of the In­sti­tute of In­ter­na­tion­al Re­la­tions, Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) Dr An­tho­ny Gon­za­les be­lieves that Venezue­lan mi­grants have made and can con­tin­ue to make an eco­nom­ic con­tri­bu­tion to T&T. How­ev­er he is not sure whether Venezue­lan mi­grants would be will­ing to stay in T&T and work legal­ly.