It is im­pos­si­ble to as­sess the per­for­mance of Colm Im­bert as this na­tion’s longest con­tin­u­ous­ly serv­ing min­is­ter of fi­nance with­out look­ing at the econ­o­my he in­her­it­ed when he was ap­point­ed by for­mer Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Christo­pher Row­ley in Sep­tem­ber 2015.

In the two fi­nan­cial years be­fore Mr Im­bert be­came T&T’s min­is­ter of fi­nance, the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion of the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship col­lect­ed $47.97 bil­lion in cur­rent en­er­gy rev­enues—$28.05 bil­lion from Oc­to­ber 1, 2023 to Sep­tem­ber 30, 2014 and $19.50 bil­lion be­tween Oc­to­ber 1 2014 and Sep­tem­ber 30, 2015.

Ac­cord­ing to the 2019 Re­view of the Econ­o­my, in the first two years of Mr Im­bert’s stew­ard­ship—which would have been from Oc­to­ber 1, 2015 to Sep­tem­ber 30, 2017—the Gov­ern­ment col­lect­ed $15.63 bil­lion in cur­rent en­er­gy rev­enues. That means the rev­enues from the en­er­gy sec­tor, then and now the main dri­ver of the do­mes­tic econ­o­my, de­clined by 67.41 per cent in Mr Im­bert’s first two years.

For the five years Oc­to­ber 1, 2010 to Sep­tem­ber 30, 2015—which is a pe­ri­od that rough­ly co­in­cides with the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship ad­min­is­tra­tion—that po­lit­i­cal par­ty spent an es­ti­mat­ed $285.31 bil­lion while col­lect­ing $265.28 bil­lion in rev­enue, ac­cord­ing to Busi­ness Guardian cal­cu­la­tions of ap­pen­dix 21 of the 2016 Re­view of the Econ­o­my.

That same dataset in­di­cates that of the $265.28 bil­lion in rev­enue in that pe­ri­od, cur­rent en­er­gy rev­enues ac­count­ed for $128.68 bil­lion in fis­cal 2010 to 2015. That is about 48.5 per cent of to­tal rev­enue.

In the first five years of Mr Im­bert’s con­trol of the T&T Trea­sury—that is the pe­ri­od from Oc­to­ber 1, 2015 to Sep­tem­ber 30, 2020—the Gov­ern­ment col­lect­ed $205.44 bil­lion. In that five-year pe­ri­od, the PNM ad­min­is­tra­tion col­lect­ed $51.27 bil­lion in cur­rent en­er­gy rev­enues, ac­cord­ing to the 2021 Re­view of the Econ­o­my. That means that 24.95 per cent of the to­tal rev­enue col­lect­ed in Mr Im­bert’s first five years came from cur­rent en­er­gy rev­enues.

If my cal­cu­la­tions are cor­rect, that al­so means that at $51.27 bil­lion, the Min­istry of Fi­nance un­der Mr Im­bert would have col­lect­ed 60.15 per cent less in cur­rent en­er­gy rev­enues than the $128.68 bil­lion that T&T earned in the five years of the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship ad­min­is­tra­tion.

Trans­fers and sub­si­dies

The 2016 Re­view of the Econ­o­my al­so in­di­cates that of the $285.31 bil­lion spent dur­ing the pe­ri­od Oc­to­ber 1, 2010 to Sep­tem­ber 30, 2015, a to­tal of $147.72 bil­lion was spent on trans­fers and sub­si­dies.

That means 51.77 per cent of the to­tal ex­pen­di­ture in the five years of the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship’s stew­ard­ship went to trans­fers and sub­si­dies.

By my cal­cu­la­tion, the T&T gov­ern­ment, with Mr Im­bert con­trol­ling the econ­o­my’s fi­nan­cial reins, spent a to­tal of $253.35 bil­lion in the five-year pe­ri­od Oc­to­ber 1, 2015 to Sep­tem­ber 30, 2020. Of that amount, $131.32 bil­lion was spent on trans­fers and sub­si­dies, amount­ing to 51.83 per cent of the to­tal spent. That would have been 11.1 per cent less than was spent by the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship.

Hard road to hoe

From the above, there is no doubt that in the first five years of his nine and half term, Mr Im­bert had less mon­ey to spend, giv­en the dra­mat­ic de­cline in cur­rent en­er­gy sec­tor rev­enues. That would have meant less for­eign ex­change and al­so a re­duced amount of mon­ey that could be spent on trans­fers and sub­si­dies.

That line item in the bud­get, trans­fers and sub­si­dies, is how the cur­rent and past ad­min­is­tra­tions have main­tained low elec­tric­i­ty and wa­ter rates, “free” ed­u­ca­tion and health­care, in­clud­ing the Chron­ic Dis­ease As­sis­tance Pro­gramme (CDAP), re­duced cost of in­ter-is­land trans­porta­tion by air and fer­ry, low­er fu­el prices than the eco­nom­ic cost, low­er cost hous­ing for mid­dle-and-low­er-in­come house­holds etc.

Trans­fers and sub­si­dies, in my view, have been the means by which ad­min­is­tra­tions past and present, have trans­ferred mon­ey from the en­er­gy rents to the pop­u­la­tion and lim­it­ed the im­pact of high­er prices on the ma­jor­i­ty of the pop­u­la­tion.

Im­bert’s pros

Mod­er­ate in­fla­tion—In the nine years from 2016 to 2024, the av­er­age an­nu­al in­fla­tion rate (as mea­sured by the per cent change in the con­sumer price in­dex) was 2.28 per cent;

The rea­sons for this mod­er­ate rate of in­fla­tion in­clude the amount of mon­ey spent on trans­fers and sub­si­dies and main­tain­ing tight con­trol over the pub­lic sec­tor wage bill (which some may see as a con);

Fis­cal pru­dence—Apart from 2020 and 2021, when the fis­cal deficit to­talled over $29 bil­lion, ac­cord­ing to the 2024 Re­view of the Econ­o­my, the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion main­tained a tight grip on ex­pen­di­ture to en­sure that Gov­ern­ment bor­row­ing did not get out of hand. He did not, for ex­am­ple, promise pub­lic ser­vants a dou­ble-dig­it wage in­crease in the 2025 bud­get, when he knew that that would have cur­ried favour with a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age of the work­ing, and vot­ing, pop­u­la­tion.

Im­bert’s cons

Lack of growth—The for­mer min­is­ter of fi­nance has been crit­i­cised by a mem­ber of the Op­po­si­tion Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress for pre­sid­ing over an econ­o­my that he ar­gues was the sev­enth worst per­form­ing econ­o­my in the world for the pe­ri­od 2016 and to 2024. That seems to have gen­er­at­ed a great deal of heat. In my view, to base the per­for­mance of an econ­o­my sole­ly on its growth rate ig­nores many oth­er salient vari­ables such as the rate of in­fla­tion, the lev­el of un­em­ploy­ment and the lev­el of trans­fers and sub­si­dies, which sup­port the stan­dard of liv­ing in a coun­try. On the oth­er hand, T&T econ­o­my has in­deed grown slow­ly in the last 10 years;

Ex­change rate un­com­pet­i­tive—The do­mes­tic econ­o­my has grown slow­ly in the last 10 years, be­cause Mr Im­bert, and the Cab­i­net of which he is a part, have not been as suc­cess­ful as they should have been in at­tract­ing new in­vest­ment in both the en­er­gy and non-en­er­gy sec­tors. In my view, this is be­cause the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion has ruled out, and con­tin­ues to rule out, al­low­ing a care­ful­ly man­aged flota­tion of the coun­try’s main ex­change rate (the US$ to TT$). As has been ar­gued in this space, and the oth­er one, for the last 12 y­­ears this month, a man­aged flota­tion makes the cost of im­ports more ex­pen­sive and the cost of ex­ports more com­pet­i­tive. In do­ing so, flota­tion en­cour­ages ex­ports and dis­cour­ages non-es­sen­tial im­ports; it en­cour­ages in­vest­ment in ex­ports and it dri­ves the repa­tri­a­tion of cap­i­tal; and

Echo cham­ber—Mr Im­bert’s main fail­ing is that he failed to ex­pose his ideas to the ro­bust cri­tique of peo­ple out­side of a small cir­cle in the PNM. The Gov­ern­ment ig­nored the free ad­vice, pro­vid­ed by the high­ly re­spect­ed duo of econ­o­mists Wen­dell Mot­t­ley and Eu­ric Bobb in the pages of this pub­li­ca­tion last No­vem­ber that “…as stake­hold­ers con­tin­ue to de­mand that ‘the Gov­ern­ment do some­thing’ we must not lose sight of the fact that ex­pe­ri­ence teach­es us that an ad­min­is­tra­tive sys­tem is bur­den­some, in­ef­fi­cient and less ef­fec­tive than the mar­ket-based sys­tem in place over most of the last few decades.”

And I am sure the Gov­ern­ment did not ask, for ex­am­ple, the ad­vice of the now de­funct Eco­nom­ic De­vel­op­ment Ad­vi­so­ry Board, which was chaired by top-notch econ­o­mist Dr Ter­rence Far­rell, about the ef­fi­ca­cy of T&T’s ex­change rate with spe­cif­ic ref­er­ence to the flota­tion in April 1993.