Trinidad and To­ba­go has not been in a re­ces­sion for the last year and in­stead the econ­o­my has set­tled at a low­er lev­el, ac­cord­ing to the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of Bourse Se­cu­ri­ties, Sub­has Ramkhelawan.

Ramkhelawan was speak­ing on CNC3’s The Morn­ing Brew when he re­spond­ed to Trade and In­dus­try Min­is­ter Paula Gopee-Scoon’s de­c­la­ra­tion that the coun­try is no longer in a re­ces­sion.

Ramkhelawan said: “A re­ces­sion is tech­ni­cal­ly de­fined as two con­sec­u­tive quar­ters of eco­nom­ic de­cline.”

He added that“maybe some­body could say, tech­ni­cal­ly, we are out of the re­ces­sion, but that has been the case for prob­a­bly a year or so.”

Gopee-Scoon’s de­c­la­ra­tion came a day af­ter Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley ad­mit­ted that the coun­try was still fac­ing eco­nom­ic chal­lenges.

Ramkhelawan said there’s a new struc­ture to the econ­o­my with low­er gov­ern­ment rev­enues and a re­duced Gross Do­mes­tic Prod­uct (GDP). With re­spect to the non-en­er­gy sec­tor, the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of Bourse Se­cu­ri­ties said it was strug­gling. He said too many man­u­fac­tur­ers were net users of for­eign ex­change with the ex­cep­tion be­ing those in the bev­er­age and snacks sub-sec­tors.

Ramkhelawan said for the econ­o­my to grow man­u­fac­tur­ers need to move down­stream of the en­er­gy sec­tor. He not­ed that the on­ly dri­ver of the econ­o­my is the en­er­gy sec­tor, which was sup­posed to grow by 6 per cent in 2018 and 2019 by 2.4 per cent ac­cord­ing to the fig­ures from the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund.

“We are bet­ter off in the en­er­gy sec­tor in terms of gas,” said Ramkhelawan.“We are not out of the woods at all in terms of the non-en­er­gy sec­tor be­cause the non-en­er­gy sec­tor re­al­ly, is high­ly de­pen­dent on what hap­pens in the en­er­gy sec­tor - in terms of sales, in terms of dis­tri­b­u­tion, in terms of ser­vices.”

Ramkhelawan al­so not­ed the sig­nif­i­cant de­cline in Gov­ern­ment ex­pen­di­ture. He echoed the Prime Min­is­ter’s sen­ti­ments con­cern­ing the im­pact that re­duced gov­ern­ment spend­ing has on the econ­o­my.

“If gov­ern­ment rev­enues and gov­ern­ment ex­pen­di­ture falls, it feeds right across the econ­o­my be­cause gov­ern­ment is a very sig­nif­i­cant spender in the econ­o­my,” he said.

Ramkhelawan added that “cit­i­zens are start­ing to come to grips” with the ad­just­ments in the econ­o­my but their con­fi­dence re­mains low.

Ramkhelawan not­ed that there are two types of cap­i­tal ex­pen­di­ture (cap ex), one that is in­fra­struc­tur­al in na­ture and the oth­er is rev­enue gen­er­at­ing.

He said: “We are not see­ing any kind of cap ex re­al­ly, that is di­rect­ly fo­cused on the gen­er­a­tion of rev­enue.”