Trinidad and To­ba­go’s econ­o­my is ex­pect­ed to con­tract by one per cent this year, the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund has pro­ject­ed in its lat­est World Eco­nom­ic Out­look.

This is a drop from the pro­jec­tion of eco­nom­ic growth of 2.1 per cent that the IMF had pre­dict­ed in Ju­ly.

Ac­cord­ing to the IMF, T&T is ex­pect­ed to ex­pe­ri­ence eco­nom­ic growth of 5.4 per cent next year with growth of 1.6 per cent pro­ject­ed for 2026.

Of all the coun­tries in the Latin Amer­i­ca and Caribbean re­gion, Guyana is ex­pect­ed to reg­is­ter the high­est lev­el of eco­nom­ic growth, the IMF pro­ject­ed.

Guyana is pro­ject­ed to ex­pe­ri­ence eco­nom­ic growth of 20.4 per cent this year.

Over­all the LAC re­gion is ex­pect­ed to record eco­nom­ic growth of 6.3 per cent in 2021, the IMF stat­ed.

“Com­pared to our Ju­ly fore­cast, the glob­al growth pro­jec­tion for 2021 has been re­vised down mar­gin­al­ly to 5.9 per­cent and is un­changed for 2022 at 4.9 per cent,” Gi­ta Gopinath, the Eco­nom­ic Coun­sel­lor and Di­rec­tor of Re­search, stat­ed.

“This mod­est head­line re­vi­sion, how­ev­er, masks large down­grades for some coun­tries. The out­look for the low-in­come de­vel­op­ing coun­try group has dark­ened con­sid­er­ably due to wors­en­ing pan­dem­ic dy­nam­ics. The down­grade al­so re­flects more dif­fi­cult near-term prospects for the ad­vanced econ­o­my group, in part due to sup­ply dis­rup­tions. Par­tial­ly off­set­ting these changes, pro­jec­tions for some com­mod­i­ty ex­porters have been up­grad­ed on the back of ris­ing com­mod­i­ty prices. Pan­dem­ic-re­lat­ed dis­rup­tions to con­tact-in­ten­sive sec­tors have caused the labour mar­ket re­cov­ery to sig­nif­i­cant­ly lag the out­put re­cov­ery in most coun­tries,” she stat­ed.

Gopinath stat­ed that the dan­ger­ous di­ver­gence in eco­nom­ic prospects across coun­tries re­mains a ma­jor con­cern.

“These eco­nom­ic di­ver­gences are a con­se­quence of large dis­par­i­ties in vac­cine ac­cess and in pol­i­cy sup­port,” she stat­ed.

Gopinath stat­ed that re­cent de­vel­op­ments have made it abun­dant­ly clear that we are all in this to­geth­er and the pan­dem­ic is not over any­where un­til it is over every­where.

“If COVID-19 were to have a pro­longed im­pact in­to the medi­um term, it could re­duce glob­al GDP by a cu­mu­la­tive $5.3 tril­lion over the next five years rel­a­tive to our cur­rent pro­jec­tion. It does not have to be this way. The glob­al com­mu­ni­ty must step up ef­forts to en­sure eq­ui­table vac­cine ac­cess for every coun­try, over­come vac­cine hes­i­tan­cy where there is ad­e­quate sup­ply, and se­cure bet­ter eco­nom­ic prospects for all,” she stat­ed.