Sto­ries by Ky­ron Reg­is

ky­ron.reg­is@guardian.co.tt

Glob­al rat­ing agency, Moody’s has con­firmed T&T’s Ba1 cred­it rat­ing in the midst of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, but the out­look for the coun­try is not pos­i­tive, a re­lease from the Min­istry of Fi­nance has stat­ed.

The state­ment not­ed that T&T’s rat­ing is “one of the high­est in the Caribbean re­gion.”

It con­tin­ued to un­der­score that in a se­ries of rat­ing de­ci­sions that have seen a num­ber of oil and gas ex­port­ing coun­tries down­grad­ed all over the world, the rat­ing agency “has sim­ply changed the out­look to neg­a­tive.”

In 2019, Moody’s rat­ed the coun­try at Ba1, sta­ble.

The Fi­nance Min­is­ter, Colm Im­bert not­ed: “The rat­ing agency’s de­ci­sion to keep the rat­ing of T&T un­changed is a tes­ti­mo­ny to the re­silience of the coun­try, in the face of un­prece­dent­ed shocks.”

Ac­cord­ing to the state­ment, the COVID-19 cri­sis com­bined with the col­lapse of oil prices have led rat­ing agen­cies to change the rat­ing of a very large num­ber of coun­tries.

It high­light­ed that the shock-ab­sorp­tion ca­pac­i­ty of T&T has been en­hanced by a bold and pro-ac­tive pol­i­cy re­sponse.

It al­so not­ed that the rat­ing sta­bil­i­ty “owes in good part to the track record of the gov­ern­ment,” which re­spond­ed to the pre­vi­ous oil shock post-2015, in a way that, ac­cord­ing to Moody’s, ex­ceed­ed its ex­pec­ta­tions.

The Min­istry an­nounced that it is the in­ten­tion of the gov­ern­ment to con­tin­ue to pre­serve what un­der­pins Moody’s cred­it rat­ing—the siz­able fis­cal buffers, low liq­uid­i­ty risk and lim­it­ed ex­ter­nal vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties.

Im­bert re­marked that the afore­men­tioned mech­a­nisms pro­tect the pop­u­la­tion of T&T through­out ex­cep­tion­al­ly ad­verse glob­al cir­cum­stance.

Last year, Moody’s said that T&T’s rat­ing would be down­grad­ed if gov­ern­ment debt ra­tios were to ma­te­ri­al­ly wors­en.

The agency said that while eco­nom­ic growth was pro­ject­ed (pre-COVID-19), there were still chal­lenges res­i­dent in T&T.

Moody’s said, in the pri­or year, that prospects for eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion re­mained weak, in­sti­tu­tion­al short­com­ings were present in the coun­try and in­ef­fec­tive pol­i­cy-mak­ing in­sti­tu­tions were con­strain­ing the coun­try’s cred­it rat­ing.

In 2019, It said that the busi­ness en­vi­ron­ment re­mained sick­ly due to struc­tur­al fac­tors like high crime rates, skills mis­match­es in the la­bor force, lim­it­ed ac­cess to fi­nance, and cli­mate-re­lat­ed risks, which posed chal­lenges to the de­vel­op­ment of more ro­bust non-en­er­gy eco­nom­ic sec­tors.