The Triple He­lix mod­el of in­no­va­tion has at­tract­ed con­sid­er­able at­ten­tion in both de­vel­oped and de­vel­op­ing economies as an in­te­gral pol­i­cy-mak­ing tool to en­hance in­no­va­tion and pro­mote eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment.

So wrote Hen­ry Et­zkowitz from Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty and Loet Ley­des­dorff from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Am­s­ter­dam in their 1995 re­search pa­per ti­tled The Triple He­lix-Uni­ver­si­ty-In­dus­try-Gov­ern­ment Re­la­tions: A Lab­o­ra­to­ry for Knowl­edge-Based Eco­nom­ic De­vel­op­ment.

The prob­lem with T&T, how­ev­er, is that none of the three el­e­ments re­quired for the Triple He­lix to work is func­tion­ing as it should, econ­o­mist Dr Ter­rence Far­rell has stat­ed.

Far­rell made the state­ment as the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce host­ed its post-bud­get fo­rum on Tues­day.

“You have to have col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween the gov­ern­ment, in­dus­try that is the pri­vate sec­tor, and the uni­ver­si­ty. The prob­lem with the Triple He­lix in our con­text is that gov­ern­ment has prob­lems be­cause the pub­lic sec­tor is weak, the pri­vate sec­tor has prob­lems be­cause the pri­vate sec­tor has grown up in a kind of rent scheme en­vi­ron­ment and the uni­ver­si­ty has prob­lems be­cause the uni­ver­si­ty has been ba­si­cal­ly teach­ing the­o­ry. Our fac­ul­ty of en­gi­neer­ing for ex­am­ple is teach­ing en­gi­neer­ing sci­ence more so than it teach­es peo­ple how to solve prob­lems” Far­rell said.

“So all three el­e­ments of the Triple He­lix, gov­ern­ment, in­dus­try and the uni­ver­si­ties have to be re­formed, they have to be re­ori­ent­ed in terms of how they can ad­dress the ques­tion of fos­ter­ing in­no­va­tion in our econ­o­my go­ing for­ward, and there­fore we need to have a plan, we need to have a set of poli­cies and a plan for do­ing that,” he said.

The is­sue of the ne­ces­si­ty for plan­ning is what the cur­rent chair­man of Re­pub­lic Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings and for­mer coun­try man­ag­er for BHP Vin­cent Pereira said he feels is re­quired to en­sure the coun­try’s en­er­gy tran­si­tion is prop­er­ly ad­dressed.

Pereira said as the world moves to­ward the glob­al en­er­gy tran­si­tion by 2050 it is like­ly there will be quite a lot of com­pe­ti­tion to pro­duce as much oil and gas as quick­ly as pos­si­ble.

“What this im­plies, there is al­so go­ing to be coun­try and coun­try com­pe­ti­tion to at­tract oil and gas in­vest­ment in ex­plo­ration and de­vel­op­ment,” he said.

Pereira said we should con­sid­er 2050 to be “right around the cor­ner.”

“We know that tran­si­tions are filled with un­cer­tain­ty. This one is the moth­er of all tran­si­tions if I can say that. It is large, it is com­plex and it is not go­ing to be easy, it is prob­a­bly go­ing to be very nasty. It is go­ing to be volatile and it is go­ing to take time and there are no sil­ver bul­lets,” he said.

What makes it even worse, Pereira said, is the fact that we are in the midst of a pan­dem­ic.

Pereira said log­ic would dic­tate that the en­er­gy prices are not sus­tain­able.

“But in this world, I don’t know if log­ic is the fi­nal ar­biter, to be hon­est,” he said.

“We must use the time and strength that we have to be deeply strate­gic in our think­ing right now, pur­pose­ful in our ap­proach to how we do things and re­al­ly high qual­i­ty in our ex­e­cu­tion,” Pereira said.

“Be­cause at the time we are try­ing to tran­si­tion from oil and gas to re­new­able en­er­gy we are al­so di­ver­si­fy­ing our econ­o­my,” he said.

Pereira said the coun­try needs a good plan to en­sure we max­imise op­por­tu­ni­ties.

Far­rell agreed that the coun­try al­so needs a plan that em­braces the re­al­i­ty of the en­er­gy tran­si­tion tak­ing place and takes us for­ward in a struc­tured way.

“The truth of the mat­ter is we do not have that. What we have is that we have bits and pieces of ini­tia­tives,” Far­rell said.

Far­rell said a plan is “bad­ly need­ed.”

He said over­all plan­ning in­di­cates to the coun­try and all of the play­ers in it where the gov­ern­ment in­tends to take us.

As such he said the plan has to be gen­er­at­ed through a process of con­sul­ta­tion so peo­ple un­der­stand what the is­sues are.

The econ­o­mist lament­ed what he called de­ci­sions which are “good pol­i­tics but bad eco­nom­ics.”

An ex­am­ple of that he said is the in­ten­tion to give peo­ple re­bates for en­er­gy con­sump­tion.

“We are prais­ing the bud­get for the things it is ar­tic­u­lat­ing but the truth of the mat­ter is that many of the things the bud­get is ar­tic­u­lat­ing quite right­ly are things we ought to have done years ago,” he said.

Among those things, he said, are the pro­posed merg­er of the Home Mort­gage Bank and the T&T Mort­gage Fi­nance.

Far­rell said for­mer fi­nance min­is­ter Prof Win­ston Dook­er­an float­ed this idea over a decade ago.

“That came out of work that had been done by the TTMF years be­fore, that is how it got in­to Mr Dook­er­an’s bud­get and there­fore what is im­por­tant in that par­tic­u­lar pro­pos­al which is not re­flect­ed for ex­am­ple in the bud­get state­ment is the fact that what is crit­i­cal for the mort­gage mar­ket in terms of fund­ing it is the ca­pac­i­ty that the Home Mort­gage Bank had as a statu­to­ry cor­po­ra­tion with the abil­i­ty to is­sue tax-free bonds to be able to gen­er­ate low-cost funds which could then go in­to the hous­ing mar­ket,” he said.

“Now that has gone away, I don’t know where that went in the whole process but that is ab­solute­ly crit­i­cal if we are go­ing to vi­talise the hous­ing fi­nance mar­ket in T&T,” he said.

Far­rell said an­oth­er ex­am­ple of this is the pro­posed merg­er of In­vesTT and Ex­porTT and these oth­er agen­cies.

He said this was pro­pos­al was made by the State En­ter­prise Com­mit­tee about five years ago.

“We said this need­ed to be done be­cause a lot of these agen­cies quite frankly are trip­ping over each oth­er not achiev­ing a lot and it could ac­tu­al­ly be ac­com­plished by one agency,” he said.