Moody's In­vestors Ser­vices, one of the pre­mier in­ter­na­tion­al rat­ing agen­cies which rank the cred­it­wor­thi­ness of bor­row­ers, in par­tic­u­lar sov­er­eign gov­ern­ments, has af­firmed the Ba2 rat­ing of Trinidad and To­ba­go but moved Trinidad and To­ba­go's out­look up­wards from sta­ble to pos­i­tive, a state­ment by the Min­istry of Fi­nance said Mon­day.

It added that Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Colm Im­bert 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.

"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 min­istry said.

It added, "The im­prove­ment in the coun­try's out­look is al­so an ac­knowl­edge­ment 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."

Moody's ob­served that "The gov­ern­ment's adopt­ed struc­tur­al fis­cal and eco­nom­ic re­forms are re­flect­ed in im­prov­ing in­sti­tu­tions and gov­er­nance strength as­sess­ment as a dri­ver of this ac­tion."