Fi­nance Min­is­ter, Colm Im­bert, said last night that Moody’s In­vestors Ser­vices, has af­firmed the Ba2 rat­ing of Trinidad and To­ba­go, but moved the coun­try’s out­look up­wards from sta­ble to pos­i­tive.

In a news re­lease, Im­bert de­scribed Moody’s In­vestors Ser­vices as one of the pre­mier in­ter­na­tion­al rat­ing agen­cies which rank the cred­it­wor­thi­ness of bor­row­ers, in par­tic­u­lar sov­er­eign gov­ern­ments,

He said he con­sid­ers this af­fir­ma­tive ac­tion on the part of Moody’s to be a wel­come de­vel­op­ment, be­cause it ac­knowl­edges the pos­i­tive out­come of the ef­forts of the coun­try through­out the sev­er­al dif­fer­ent shocks that have tak­en place over the re­cent years, such as oil and gas prices shocks and the se­vere ad­verse ef­fects of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

Im­bert said Moody’s pos­i­tive out­look for Trinidad and To­ba­go is based on the fis­cal per­for­mance of the coun­try, which goes be­yond the wind­fall of last year as a re­sult of the surge in oil and gas prices and flows from pos­i­tive de­vel­op­ments favourably af­fect­ing gas pro­duc­tion ca­pac­i­ty and eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion.

The im­prove­ment in the coun­try’s out­look is al­so an ac­knowl­edg­ment of pol­i­cy ef­fec­tive­ness, il­lus­trat­ed by the ca­pac­i­ty of the Gov­ern­ment to im­ple­ment dif­fi­cult but nec­es­sary long-term re­forms in re­struc­tur­ing trans­fers and sub­si­dies and im­prov­ing rev­enue col­lec­tion, ac­cord­ing to the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance.

In the news re­lease, Moody’s is re­port­ed to have ob­served, “The gov­ern­ment’s adopt­ed struc­tur­al fis­cal and eco­nom­ic re­forms are re­flect­ed in an im­prov­ing in­sti­tu­tions and gov­er­nance strength as­sess­ment as a dri­ver of this ac­tion.”

Im­bert said the im­prove­ment in T&T’s out­look is a first step in the con­ver­gence and har­mon­i­sa­tion of the coun­try’s in­ter­na­tion­al cred­it rat­ings.

It is al­so clear that our cred­it rat­ing dy­nam­ics and mo­men­tum are now pos­i­tive, which is of sig­nif­i­cant im­por­tance in a world of more el­e­vat­ed in­ter­est rates.

Bet­ter cred­it rat­ings will pos­i­tive­ly in­flu­ence the cost of fund­ing for the Gov­ern­ment and State En­ter­pris­es and the econ­o­my of Trinidad and To­ba­go as a whole, said Im­bert.