T&T will be re-as­sessed soon by the Do­ing Busi­ness arm of the World Bank to de­ter­mine if the coun­try has seen im­prove­ment in the Ease of Do­ing Busi­ness in­di­ca­tors.

This was re­vealed by the Min­is­ter of Trade and In­dus­try Paula Gopee-Scoon at a me­dia press brief­ing yes­ter­day.

Gopee-Scoon said, “Through the Sin­gle Elec­tron­ic Win­dow, we have been fo­cus­ing on e-busi­ness (to call it that), and deal­ing with the 10 in­di­ca­tors on the do­ing busi­ness re­port, which we are mea­sured by; and we are go­ing to be mea­sured pret­ty soon.”

As Gopee-Scoon ad­dressed the coun­try’s rank­ing in the Ease of Do­ing Busi­ness In­dex, she not­ed, “We’re not in a good place, and we’ve said that be­fore.” The min­is­ter em­pha­sised she has told the pub­lic be­fore that T&T be­ing ranked 105 out of 190 coun­tries is not good enough.

How­ev­er, the min­is­ter re­marked that progress has been made with re­gard to De­vel­opTT, the coun­try’s on­line por­tal that can be used to ac­quire de­vel­op­ment per­mits.

Gopee-Scoon ex­plained that the min­istry is pleased about the gains made on the plat­form. She not­ed that the coun­try has tran­si­tioned from tak­ing 270 days to 38 days to get a per­mit.

Al­though, the min­is­ter ob­served that this per­tains to an un­com­pli­cat­ed re­quest, she de­scribed the achieve­ment of dras­ti­cal­ly min­imis­ing the days it takes to re­ceive a con­struc­tion per­mit as with­in the glob­al stan­dards.

The Ease of Do­ing Busi­ness Re­port mea­sures and tracks changes in reg­u­la­tions af­fect­ing 12 ar­eas in the life cy­cle of a busi­ness, ten of which are in­clud­ed in the rank­ing.  These in­clude: trad­ing across bor­ders; start­ing a busi­ness; deal­ing with con­struc­tion per­mits; reg­is­ter­ing prop­er­ty; get­ting cred­it; re­solv­ing in­sol­ven­cy; pay­ing tax­es; pro­tect­ing mi­nor­i­ty in­vestors; en­forc­ing con­tracts; and get­ting elec­tric­i­ty.

Based on a gov­ern­ment doc­u­ment called, Up­date On Im­prov­ing the Ease of Do­ing Busi­ness in T&T—May 2020, of which Guardian Me­dia (GML) has a copy, the coun­try has not on­ly im­proved with re­spect to deal­ing with con­struc­tion per­mits, but it has al­so shown im­prove­ment in trad­ing across bor­ders.

Trad­ing across bor­ders has been im­proved through the im­ple­men­ta­tion of con­tain­er scan­ners.

Ac­cord­ing to the Min­istry of Trade and In­vest­ment: “In No­vem­ber 2019, the GORTT com­mis­sioned x-ray car­go scan­ners at the Port of Port-of- Spain and the Port of Point Lisas.”

It con­tin­ued: “The in­stal­la­tion of these scan­ners has en­abled faster Cus­toms clear­ance and in­spec­tions since con­tain­ers can be scanned at a much faster rate in­stead of be­ing sub­ject to tra­di­tion­al phys­i­cal un­stuff­ing and in­spec­tion.”

Oth­er im­ple­men­ta­tions made by the Gov­ern­ment that would im­prove the Ease of Do­ing Busi­ness in the coun­try are the on­line pay­ment for WASA bills, on­line ap­pli­ca­tions for birth, death and mar­riage cer­tifi­cates and the digi­ti­sa­tion of land reg­istry records.

Nonethe­less, the Trade Min­is­ter ar­tic­u­lat­ed that T&T has to move fur­ther than the afore­men­tioned ac­com­plish­ment.

Gopee-Scoon high­light­ed that the coun­try should move from e-busi­ness to e-gov­ern­ment be­cause, “that’s what the pop­u­la­tion wants.”

She added that the min­istry is look­ing in­to sev­er­al re­forms for busi­ness.

“We’re look­ing, for in­stance, at e-pay­ments for busi­ness but, across Gov­ern­ment as well.”

She re­vealed that the min­istry is prob­ing the abil­i­ty to have con­nec­tiv­i­ty be­tween all of the ports, the Sin­gle Elec­tron­ic Win­dow and Cus­toms so that the coun­try can have in­ter­op­er­abil­i­ty among all the con­nect­ed Gov­ern­ment agen­cies. (The Sin­gle Elec­tron­ic Win­dow sys­tem en­ables a sin­gle elec­tron­ic sub­mis­sion of trade-re­lat­ed doc­u­ments to mul­ti­ple Gov­ern­ment en­ti­ties.)

Ac­cord­ing to the Trade Min­is­ter, T&T has to cre­ate a dig­i­tal econ­o­my. She al­so re­marked that the Road Map to Re­cov­ery Com­mit­tee is al­so hav­ing dis­cus­sions on the cre­ation of a dig­i­tal econ­o­my.

Gopee-Scoon ac­knowl­edged that COVID-19 had a dele­te­ri­ous ef­fect on the na­tion’s econ­o­my and di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion is im­por­tant.

The Min­is­ter said be­fore there were talks about di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion, T&T was al­ways an en­er­gy province and it “will re­main an en­er­gy province”.

She not­ed that while there are sec­tors that can con­tribute to the di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion ef­fort—the en­er­gy sec­tor would al­ways re­main im­por­tant.