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Sunday, May 25, 2025

Citizens’ concerns about the economy

by

Guardian Media Limited
745 days ago
20230511

Two is­sues guar­an­teed to gen­er­ate in­tense and con­tentious di­a­logue in this coun­try are the wors­en­ing crime sit­u­a­tion and the state of the econ­o­my.

Yes­ter­day, the fo­cus was on the lat­ter is­sue, as Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert went to Par­lia­ment to de­liv­er his Mid-Year Re­view of the Bud­get. In his usu­al style, Mr Im­bert used some of his al­lot­ted time to chide crit­ics and point out the er­rors of an­a­lysts and ex­perts in their as­sess­ment of T&T’s eco­nom­ic health.

For ex­am­ple, he spent some time pin­point­ing mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions and mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the oil and gas prices on which the Bud­get is based. This is an is­sue that re­quires some clar­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en the volatil­i­ty in glob­al en­er­gy mar­kets and its im­pact on the T&T econ­o­my.

How­ev­er, oth­er con­cerns need to be giv­en at­ten­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly for cit­i­zens at the grass­roots lev­el, who have borne the brunt of the eco­nom­ic fall­out and ex­pe­ri­enced hard­ships fur­ther ex­ac­er­bat­ed by the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic and Rus­sia’s in­va­sion of Ukraine.

Re­spond­ing to his de­trac­tors is one thing, but Mr Im­bert should spend more of his time ad­dress­ing bread-and-but­ter is­sues fac­ing or­di­nary cit­i­zens, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en the fact that T&T is still emerg­ing from some very dif­fi­cult years of eco­nom­ic de­cline.

The Fi­nance Min­is­ter, who spent much of his time ear­ly in his tenure in­tro­duc­ing belt-tight­en­ing and sta­bil­i­sa­tion mea­sures as the coun­try faced plung­ing en­er­gy prices, still needs to lev­el with the pop­u­la­tion.

This has to do not on­ly with the pro­ject­ed growth of re­al GDP ex­pect­ed this fis­cal year, but the nec­es­sary tran­si­tion this en­er­gy-de­pen­dant na­tion must make as the world shifts from fos­sil fu­els to re­new­able en­er­gy.

More than ever be­fore, this coun­try’s en­er­gy de­pen­den­cy has made the econ­o­my more sus­cep­ti­ble to fall­outs from geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sions, cli­mate change and ad­vance­ments in tech­nol­o­gy. Cit­i­zens have felt the ef­fects in their pock­ets.

What mat­ters to the av­er­age Trin­bag­on­ian is why, with all the talk of high­er prices for oil and gas on world mar­kets, was there an “un­ex­pect­ed weak per­for­mance” in the lo­cal en­er­gy sec­tor.

Al­so, is there cause for con­cern with Mr Im­bert’s rev­e­la­tion yes­ter­day of de­creased rev­enue and high­er ex­pen­di­ture fig­ures from those he pre­sent­ed in the Bud­get last Sep­tem­ber?

The ab­sence of de­tails on how some eco­nom­ic ad­just­ments di­rect­ly af­fect cit­i­zens, leaves room for the spec­u­la­tion and mis­in­for­ma­tion the Min­is­ter com­plains about so of­ten. He needs to proac­tive­ly ad­dress these con­cerns and save him­self the trou­ble of hav­ing to cor­rect er­ro­neous state­ments.

In par­tic­u­lar, there needs to be a dis­cus­sion about in­fla­tion, which, at the end of 2022 was at 8.7 per cent—cit­i­zens get painful re­minders of that fact every time they go to the su­per­mar­ket.

It was a con­cern raised by the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) in its most re­cent re­port on T&T, when it rec­om­mend­ed that Gov­ern­ment “con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing tar­get­ed and tem­po­rary sup­port to al­le­vi­ate the ris­ing liv­ing costs among the most vul­ner­a­ble.”

While the fore­cast is for in­fla­tion to slow down to 4.5 per cent by the end of this year as in­ter­na­tion­al prices con­tin­ue to de­cline, con­sumers are yet to ex­pe­ri­ence any re­al re­lief and that should be of con­cern.

The Mid-Year Re­view was an op­por­tu­ni­ty for Mr Im­bert to re­spond to cit­i­zens’ con­cerns about the spend­ing pow­er of their dol­lars and whether brighter eco­nom­ic days are in­deed ahead.

For these rea­sons, the Fi­nance Min­is­ter, who is very pro­fi­cient at cor­rect­ing facts, should ded­i­cate more time dur­ing his fis­cal pre­sen­ta­tions to deal with the is­sues that mat­ter most to the pub­lic.

Editorial


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