Joel Julien

joel.julien@guardian.co.tt

Trade and In­dus­try Min­is­ter Paula Goopee-Scoon has promised the joint cham­bers that their pro­pos­als for fur­ther re­lief from the gov­ern­ment in light of the COVID-19 cri­sis will be dis­cussed with mem­bers of Cab­i­net and a de­ci­sion made on a way for­ward.

Goopee-Scoon is the Chair of the Cab­i­net sub-com­mit­tee on busi­ness and man­u­fac­tur­ing set up by the gov­ern­ment in light of the Coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic.

CEO of the Amer­i­can Cham­ber of Com­merce of Trinidad and To­ba­go (AM­CHAMTT), Ni­rad Tewarie said he spoke with Gopee-Scoon yes­ter­day about the sit­u­a­tion.

“We are op­ti­mistic that the gov­ern­ment un­der­stands the need to sup­port busi­ness to be able to sup­port em­ploy­ment and I am al­so op­ti­mistic that they will con­sid­er oth­er things, maybe some of the things that we have not pro­posed,” Tewarie said.

On Tues­day the Joint Cham­bers com­pris­ing of AM­CHAM, the En­er­gy Cham­ber of T&T, the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try & Com­merce and the T&T Man­u­fac­tur­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion, as well as the Con­fed­er­a­tion of In­dus­try and Com­merce is­sued a state­ment call­ing on the gov­ern­ment to help them save jobs in T&T by es­tab­lish­ing a tax cred­it on salaries for com­pa­nies that do not make any prof­it over the next three months.

The Joint Cham­bers’ state­ment on Tues­day list­ed five items they be­lieved to be crit­i­cal in the im­me­di­ate term in­clud­ing the de­fer­ral of cor­po­ra­tion tax and val­ue added tax pay­ments for the next three months.

“What would be a ben­e­fi­cial out­come to every­body we think would be sup­port to busi­ness­es in some form to be able to sup­port em­ploy­ment, so we are not wed­ded specif­i­cal­ly to one or the oth­er thing. We have put for­ward some sug­ges­tions for their con­sid­er­a­tion, if there are oth­er things on the ta­ble and will pro­vide liq­uid­i­ty sup­port in the short term and the op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­cov­er in the medi­um to long term then we would be equal­ly hap­py,” he said.

“The Joint Cham­bers are not about whose pol­i­cy is bet­ter, it is about which pol­i­cy is best for the widest group so we very much see our role as col­lab­o­rat­ing with the gov­ern­ment on this,” Tewarie said.

For­mer fi­nance min­is­ter Win­ston Dook­er­an said as we are in un­char­tered wa­ters and the choice be­tween ‘lives and liveli­hood’ could soon be a harsh re­al­i­ty.

“Mea­sures cur­rent­ly be­ing adopt­ed by pow­er­ful and small coun­tries are dubbed as ‘stim­u­lus pack­ages’. This is the wrong de­scrip­tion as it im­plies a ‘growth el­e­ment’ when it is re­al­ly a ‘sur­vival pack­age’,” Dook­er­an ar­gued.

Dook­er­an added as the econ­o­my en­ters in­to a ‘loop type’ cy­cle of shocks-be­tween de­mand and sup­ply-old pol­i­cy pre­scrip­tions for re­ces­sion­ary times may no longer work.

“The coro­n­avirus cri­sis has in­duced a sup­ply shock-re­duc­ing wages and pro­duc­tion-which in turn fu­els a de­mand shock-fall in pur­chas­ing pow­er. This be­comes ‘loop type’ cy­cle of shocks, in growth mod­els, shock ab­sorbers mit­i­gate the ef­fects on growth,” he said.

“But buffers and shock ab­sorbers are weak in the Caribbean econ­o­my. Shocks are ab­sorbed through ad­just­ments in labour and aus­ter­i­ty. But that will work, de­pend­ing on the mag­ni­tude of the shocks. Al­ready, it is ar­gued that to pre­vent an im­me­di­ate col­lapse, the size of the fis­cal in­jec­tion must be equiv­a­lent to the fall in the GDP. This is a tall or­der in any cir­cum­stance but has dire com­pli­ca­tions to debt, cred­it, in­comes and pover­ty lev­els,” he said.