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Raphael John-Lall

Pro­fes­sor of Eco­nom­ics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI), St. Agus­tine Roger Ho­sein is “con­cerned” about the ris­ing un­em­ploy­ment in T&T.

The lat­est Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice (CSO) da­ta shows that 5.4 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion was un­em­ployed in the first quar­ter of 2024, com­pared to 4.1 per cent for the last quar­ter of 2023.

“When you look at the up­dat­ed fig­ures (Quar­ter 1 of 2024) you would see that the num­ber of peo­ple em­ployed has fall­en. The num­ber of peo­ple un­em­ployed is ris­ing. The labour force par­tic­i­pa­tion rate has fall­en. There­fore, there is cause for con­cern,” he told the Busi­ness Guardian.

The CSO re­leased its lat­est Labour Force Sur­vey (LFS) Bul­letin on Ju­ly 9.

In the com­men­tary on its web­site, the CSO said in Quar­ter 1, 2024, the av­er­age num­ber of per­sons with jobs for all sec­tors was 560,400.

“A quar­ter-on-quar­ter com­par­i­son (2023 Q4 over 2024 Q1) re­vealed that the av­er­age num­ber of per­sons with­out jobs and seek­ing work in­creased by 25.6 per cent. A year-on-year com­par­i­son (2023 Q1 over 2024 Q1) re­vealed that the av­er­age num­ber of per­sons with­out jobs and seek­ing work mar­gin­al­ly in­creased by 2 per cent,” ac­cord­ing to the CSO bul­letin.

A year-on-year com­par­i­son (2023 Q1 over 2024 Q1) re­vealed that the av­er­age num­ber of peo­ple with­out jobs and seek­ing work mar­gin­al­ly in­creased by 2 per cent.

The CSO da­ta al­so shows that in the fourth quar­ter of 2023, the num­ber of peo­ple not in the labour force to­taled 483,600, but by the first quar­ter of 2024 the num­ber of peo­ple who were not in the labour force in­creased to 489,600 per­sons.

The to­tal num­ber of un­em­ployed per­sons in T&T as of the first quar­ter of 2024 was 31,900.

IMF op­ti­mism

In a news re­lease in June, the Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert wel­comed the pos­i­tive fore­cast of the coun­try’s econ­o­my from the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF).

“The IMF un­der­lines that ‘T&T is un­der­go­ing a grad­ual and sus­tained eco­nom­ic re­cov­ery.’ The un­em­ploy­ment rate de­creased to 3.2 per cent in 2023 af­ter peak­ing at 7.2 per cent in 2020. Eco­nom­ic growth is broad based, led by the non-en­er­gy and en­er­gy sec­tors, while in­fla­tion is low. The IMF hails the sharp de­cline in in­fla­tion, from 8.7 per­cent in De­cem­ber 2022 to 0.3 per­cent in Jan­u­ary 2024, which is among the low­est in the world and con­tributes to shield­ing the pur­chas­ing pow­er of the pop­u­la­tion,” the Min­istry of Fi­nance’s re­lease stat­ed.

Ho­sein jux­ta­posed the IMF da­ta to the lat­est CSO da­ta on the labour force and at­tempt­ed to ex­plain why the IMF is op­ti­mistic but the CSO’s da­ta for T&T paints a more pes­simistic pic­ture.

“The da­ta from the IMF for 2024 is show­ing growth but first quar­ter 2024 from the CSO, labour is show­ing a rise in the un­em­ploy­ment rate and a rise in the num­ber of per­sons un­em­ployed. It is pos­si­ble that there are more peo­ple em­ployed but some of these are Venezue­lan mi­grants, so that they are not for­mal­ly record­ed. So, while there is an in­crease in eco­nom­ic out­put, the labour mar­ket does not pick it up. There­fore, you can have growth with some fall of do­mes­tic em­ploy­ment as there may have been a dis­place­ment of some seg­ments of the lo­cal labour force by the Venezue­lans. That is pos­si­ble.

“The sec­ond thing is that with­in the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor, a lot of eco­nom­ic growth takes place for the T&T econ­o­my and some de­gree of au­toma­tion may have tak­en place there­in. So, there was a de­cline in em­ploy­ment that could be show­ing up in the over­all em­ploy­ment num­bers falling and by ex­ten­sion the un­em­ploy­ment rate ris­es.”

He of­fered so­lu­tions on how the Gov­ern­ment can in­crease the em­ploy­ment lev­els in T&T.

“To gen­er­ate more em­ploy­ment, what I would ad­vise the State to fo­cus first on is ex­port-led eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty. The cur­rent eTeck method­ol­o­gy is not work­ing as quick­ly and as well as we would like. For ex­am­ple, the Moru­ga eTeck Park does not seem to be giv­ing the kind of re­turns the State had ex­pect­ed nor does the Phoenix Park In­dus­tri­al Es­tate.

“So, the next sug­ges­tion that I would make is that we ap­proach eTeck Park by part­ner­ing it with the pri­vate sec­tor. There are a num­ber of ex­port items that are on the in­crease in terms of ex­port rev­enues for ex­am­ple, elec­tri­cal items. If one were to take a deep-dive look at the trade da­ta, one could work out what ex­port items from T&T are on the rise.”

He said that one op­tion would be to part­ner with the firms in which there is greater de­mand for their ex­port items abroad and let them ex­pand and ben­e­fit from greater economies of scale so that the State in prin­ci­ple “works with win­ners.”

An­oth­er op­tion that he pro­posed is to open an eTeck park and try to woo the di­as­po­ra out­side of T&T to try to bring in fi­nan­cial re­sources to sup­port the park and to sell prod­ucts back to the di­as­po­ra abroad.

A third op­tion he put for­ward is where the Gov­ern­ment could cre­ate more em­ploy­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties af­ter “ag­gres­sive­ly con­tain­ing the crime prob­lem.”

“As it stands, we have over 300 mur­ders for the year al­ready and if we ex­trap­o­late that it will come close to 600. Oth­er things con­stant, once we cross 600, we are like­ly to be ranked in the top 15 high­est per capi­ta mur­der rate in the world. That is not good and it is not the type of ecosys­tem that would fa­cil­i­tate a greater amount of in­vest­ment by the pri­vate sec­tor. So, the Gov­ern­ment could make a greater in­ter­ven­tion to help trig­ger em­ploy­ment by cre­at­ing the en­abling en­vi­ron­ment and low­er­ing crime and in so do­ing help to crowd in pri­vate sec­tor in­vest­ment.”