On this mo­men­tous 68th an­niver­sary of In­ter­na­tion­al Cred­it Union Day, the Trinidad and To­ba­go Coali­tion of Ser­vices In­dus­tries (TTC­SI) ex­tends our warmest, most heart­felt con­grat­u­la­tions to the Trinidad and To­ba­go Co-op­er­a­tive Cred­it Union League and the vi­brant cred­it union move­ment span­ning our beau­ti­ful twin-is­land na­tion.

For busi­ness­es in Trinidad and To­ba­go, the most con­se­quen­tial bud­get mea­sures are those that change how much cash they must re­tain, what it costs to op­er­ate and when they can af­ford to in­vest. The 2027 Bud­get presents op­por­tu­ni­ties for growth along­side pro­pos­als that could in­crease the in­ci­dent of tax­a­tion on busi­ness prof­its and greater com­pli­ance de­mands.

Caryn Jame­son has spent many years work­ing in the hos­pi­tal­i­ty in­dus­try, so when she de­cid­ed to in­vest time and mon­ey in­to her own tea house, it was with a wealth of knowl­edge and ex­pe­ri­ence to back it up.

Staff at the La Brea In­dus­tri­al De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (Labid­co) were blind­sided by the an­nounce­ment by Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar in To­ba­go on Tues­day that the com­pa­ny was be­ing con­sid­ered for di­vest­ment along­side Na­tion­al Quar­ries, Hilton Trinidad, the Mag­dale­na Grand Beach and Golf Re­sort.

Meet­ings, an­nounce­ments and com­mit­tees are not de­liv­ery. None of the five pe­tro­le­um ques­tions be­low is ad­e­quate­ly an­swered yet. The Bud­get de­bate gives Min­is­ters an op­por­tu­ni­ty to sup­ply the miss­ing com­mit­ments and ev­i­dence.

The glob­al econ­o­my is cre­at­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties that many peo­ple still don’t know ex­ist. Every week, through my work as a dig­i­tal strate­gist, I dis­cov­er com­pa­nies hir­ing in­ter­na­tion­al­ly, emerg­ing dig­i­tal ca­reers, and re­mote job boards I hadn’t en­coun­tered be­fore.

One of the pos­i­tive as­pects of the cur­rent Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) ad­min­is­tra­tion is its at­ten­tion to the wel­fare of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s pen­sion­ers.

Last week, be­fore the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance pre­sent­ed the FY2027 Bud­get, I in­tro­duced five ques­tions at the end of the col­umn to pro­vide a frame­work for eval­u­at­ing the Bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion. These were as fol­lows:

Four Cari­com as­sess­ment teams will ex­am­ine whether the re­gion can meet its own de­mand for paints, oth­er hy­draulic ce­ment, glass bot­tles and bi­tu­men, with their find­ings ex­pect­ed to help de­ter­mine fu­ture tar­iff treat­ment for the prod­ucts.

Busi­ness cham­bers in south Trinidad have of­fered favourable as­sess­ments of the 2027 na­tion­al bud­get, wel­com­ing its fo­cus on agri­cul­ture, health­care, en­er­gy and in­fra­struc­ture, while high­light­ing mea­sures they be­lieve could sup­port busi­ness­es, im­prove liveli­hoods and gen­er­ate for­eign ex­change.

The Gov­ern­ment’s bud­get 2027 has sparked de­bate among econ­o­mists, with con­cerns be­ing raised about the re­al­ism of its fis­cal pro­jec­tions, the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of planned spend­ing pro­grammes and the long-term im­pact of sev­er­al tax mea­sures on in­vest­ment and eco­nom­ic growth.

Trinidad and To­ba­go will con­tin­ue to face for­eign ex­change short­ages even when new nat­ur­al gas projects be­gin con­tribut­ing to eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty in 2027, un­less the coun­try ad­dress­es the struc­tur­al weak­ness­es that dri­ve de­mand for for­eign cur­ren­cy, econ­o­mist Dr Dave Seer­at­tan has warned.