Two days af­ter a very op­ti­mistic Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert paint­ed a pic­ture of an econ­o­my on the mend comes news from the Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice that the T&T econ­o­my record­ed a mas­sive fall in out­put for the first three months of 2022 when com­pared to the last quar­ter of 2021.

The re­port stat­ed Trinidad and To­ba­go’s econ­o­my de­clined by 4 per cent in 1st quar­ter 2022 when com­pared with 4th quar­ter 2021. This, the re­port ex­plained, was due to con­trac­tions in both the en­er­gy and non-en­er­gy sec­tors of 1.3 per­cent and 5.2 per­cent re­spec­tive­ly.

Pro­duc­tion in the en­er­gy sec­tor has been down due to low­er out­put from bpTT in nat­ur­al gas and this has had a rip­ple ef­fect on out­put from oth­er sec­tors in­clud­ing petro­chem­i­cals. Oil pro­duc­tion has re­mained rel­a­tive­ly steady at the low lev­el of 60,000 bar­rels per day. High en­er­gy prices have how­ev­er buoyed gov­ern­ment rev­enue from the sec­tor.

The re­port not­ed sev­er­al in­dus­tries in the en­er­gy sec­tor record­ed de­clines in­clud­ing : as­phalt 56.1%, pe­tro­le­um sup­port ser­vices 46.7%, crude oil ex­plo­ration and ex­trac­tion 5.2% and man­u­fac­ture of petro­chem­i­cals 5.1%.

How­ev­er some en­er­gy in­dus­tries that off­set the 1.3% de­cline in this sec­tor were: re­fin­ing (in­clud­ing LNG) by 12.1%, nat­ur­al gas ex­plo­ration and ex­trac­tion 5.5%, con­den­sate ex­trac­tion 4.5% and pe­tro­le­um and nat­ur­al gas dis­tri­b­u­tion 0.5%.Low­er out­put lev­els were record­ed with­in the non-en­er­gy sec­tor for trade and re­pairs (ex­clud­ing nat­ur­al gas and Pe­tro­le­um dis­tri­b­u­tion) 15.2%, oth­er ser­vice ac­tiv­i­ties 10.2%; con­struc­tion 9.2%, elec­tric­i­ty (ex­clud­ing gas) 3.8% and tex­tiles, cloth­ing, leather, wood, pa­per and print­ing 5.3%, the re­port stat­ed.

The re­port ex­plained the per­for­mance of trade and re­pairs (ex­clud­ing nat­ur­al gas and pe­tro­le­um dis­tri­b­u­tion) was due to the de­cline in whole­sale trade by 22.4%, re­tail trade of 13.9% and sale of ve­hi­cles of 1.7%. Oth­er ser­vice ac­tiv­i­ties de­clined pri­mar­i­ly due to de­creased ac­tiv­i­ty of fu­ner­al par­lours of 20.3%.

The main non-en­er­gy in­dus­tries which off­set the 5.2% de­cline in this sec­tor were: food, bev­er­ages and to­bac­co prod­ucts 8.9%, oth­er man­u­fac­tured prod­ucts 5.6%, trans­port and stor­age 4.2% and ac­com­mo­da­tion and food ser­vices 1.9%.

The econ­o­my con­tract­ed mar­gin­al­ly by 0.1% in 1st quar­ter of 2022 when com­pared with 1st quar­ter of 2021, the re­port said.