Rose­marie Sant

Po­lit­i­cal an­a­lysts are giv­ing the 2017-2018 fis­cal pack­age a thumbs up say­ing the Gov­ern­ment ap­peared to have lis­tened to the con­cerns of the pop­u­la­tion has spread the bur­den of ad­just­ment across the board.

Dr Win­ford James said at first glance “it was a com­pre­hen­sive bud­get that gives the im­pres­sion that the Gov­ern­ment left no stone un­turned. It demon­strat­ed that the Gov­ern­ment was aware of the prob­lems and of­fered some of the more im­por­tant so­lu­tions. The thing is to see where it goes in terms of im­ple­men­ta­tion.”

James said the min­is­ter he said ad­dressed “the is­sues of CL Fi­nan­cial, Petrotrin, the is­sue of plug­ging leaks in the tax sys­tem and so on. One of the things that struck me is that oil com­pa­nies ex­tract­ing as much oil and gas as they do­ing and not pay­ing a cent for do­ing so.”

He felt the “in­cen­tives in the hous­ing sec­tor, the fash­ion in­dus­try and the agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor all spoke to a plan to di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion, but the thing is get­ting it off the ground and man­ag­ing it be­cause the busi­ness of how you im­ple­ment what you set out to do is crit­i­cal.”

Po­lit­i­cal an­a­lyst and econ­o­mist In­deera Sagee­wan Al­li said she was sur­prised that the min­is­ter spoke in de­tail about the agri­cul­ture sec­tor but the al­lo­ca­tion was just about half a bil­lion dol­lars.

Sagee­wan Al­li felt Im­bert “was ex­treme­ly cre­ative in shar­ing the bur­den of ad­just­ment,” say­ing the bur­den was not on the small and mid­dle in­come earn­ers as in the past, she al­so felt that the in­creas­es in the tax on the bank­ing sec­tor to 35% “was very in­ter­est­ing I did not ex­pect that.”

With a theme Chang­ing the Par­a­digm Im­bert made it clear that every­one need­ed to share the bur­den of ad­just­ment and that it could not be “busi­ness as usu­al.” Sagee­wan Al­li said while the min­is­ter achieved that the pri­vate sec­tor may be “un­hap­py about the in­crease in Cor­po­ra­tion Tax.”

She was very in­ter­est­ed in the ap­proach to hous­ing, say­ing the in­cen­tive of cash or land was a “strate­gic ap­proach,” which “in­cen­tivised the pri­vate sec­tor from the small­est man who has one lot of land to put four units to the very large de­vel­op­er who can do four hun­dred units.”

She felt the fact that the Prime Min­is­ter would over­see the min­is­te­r­i­al com­mit­tee was an in­di­ca­tion of the “im­por­tance” the Gov­ern­ment was plac­ing on the ini­tia­tive, with a man­date of a “nine-month time frame for all ap­provals to come through.”

This she said will serve to “stim­u­late the econ­o­my, ku­dos to the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance on the ini­tia­tive once he can im­ple­ment it. But the proof is in the pud­ding.”