As a small is­land econ­o­my, T&T de­pends on trade with the rest of the world. This re­quires for­eign ex­change. The pol­i­cy fo­cus has al­ways been to max­imise the vol­ume of for­eign ex­change earned by ex­ports. The con­cen­tra­tion has been on the en­er­gy sec­tor in the long term whilst grow­ing the oth­er ar­eas of the econ­o­my to ex­port. The im­por­tance of the en­er­gy sec­tor is summed up in two per­cent­ages. The ex­port of hy­dro­car­bons and its petro­chem­i­cal by-prod­ucts ac­count for ap­prox­i­mate­ly 40 per cent of GDP and 80 per cent of for­eign ex­change gen­er­a­tion.

Japan has no nat­ur­al re­sources and im­ports all the in­puts that are re­quired to make Japan an in­dus­tri­al gi­ant. What it does have is re­source­ful, knowl­edge­able and tech­ni­cal­ly pro­fi­cient peo­ple. Japan’s pop­u­la­tion is 123.3 mil­lion peo­ple or 1.5 per cent of the world pop­u­la­tion, yet it is the third largest econ­o­my in the world. An age­ing pop­u­la­tion has slowed its growth, but it is at­tempt­ing to ad­dress this with ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence.

The point is that nat­ur­al re­sources and pop­u­la­tion size by them­selves are not the key fac­tors to eco­nom­ic and so­cial de­vel­op­ment. Ed­u­ca­tion, train­ing and cul­ture count for much more than nat­ur­al re­sources and pop­u­la­tion size. The les­son for us in T&T is that the em­pha­sis on dis­ci­pline, pro­duc­tion, tol­er­ance and ed­u­ca­tion re­mains as im­por­tant to­day as it did on in­de­pen­dence in 1962. The dif­fer­ence is that the ed­u­ca­tion modal­i­ties must change to an em­pha­sis on a teach­ing ap­proach that com­bines sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, en­gi­neer­ing, arts and math­e­mat­ics. Tech­ni­cal and vo­ca­tion­al train­ing are as im­por­tant as any oth­er ap­proach.

An­oth­er les­son from Japan is the im­por­tance of adding val­ue to the im­port­ed raw ma­te­ri­als, mean­ing that a coun­try must have tech­no­log­i­cal ca­pac­i­ty and know-how. Whilst Chi­na al­ways had the pop­u­la­tion size and a long his­to­ry of sci­en­tif­ic know-how it was not a mod­ern world pow­er. How­ev­er, Chi­na did not sim­ply open its econ­o­my to for­eign di­rect in­vest­ment. It in­sist­ed on tech­nol­o­gy trans­fer and the es­tab­lish­ment of joint ven­tures to en­sure that de­vel­op­ment in­clud­ed the trans­fer of knowl­edge and know-how.

To­day, Chi­na is the man­u­fac­tur­er to the world and the largest ex­porter not mere­ly of gar­ments and shoes, but al­so of elec­tric ve­hi­cles which threat­en to swamp the West’s lead­ing mo­tor ve­hi­cle man­u­fac­tur­ers.

At 1.5 mil­lion peo­ple, the T&T mar­ket is too small to pro­vide a vi­able mar­ket to sup­port the growth of a size­able man­u­fac­tur­ing base. That is why it was nec­es­sary to move away from the pro­tec­tion­ist poli­cies of the 1956-90 pe­ri­od and move to a more ex­port-ori­ent­ed out­look and free or lib­er­al mar­ket poli­cies. Do­mes­tic firms must have ac­cess to larg­er mar­kets and be ef­fi­cient to com­pete in in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets.

 This ex­plains the em­pha­sis on Cari­com and the Treaty of Ch­aguara­mas to cre­ate a wider re­gion­al mar­ket for re­gion­al pro­duc­ers and Cari­com’s es­tab­lish­ment of a re­gion­al ne­go­ti­a­tion ma­chin­ery to pur­sue wider-rang­ing trade agree­ments in keep­ing with the glob­al­i­sa­tion trend.

The Cari­com-Venezuela Trade Agree­ment was con­clud­ed in 1992, the Cari­com-Colom­bia Trade Agree­ment in 1994, and the Cari­com-Cos­ta Ri­ca Agree­ment in 2004. Ne­go­ti­a­tions on a Free Trade agree­ment with the Amer­i­c­as were aban­doned in 2005. This is the rea­son why the sec­re­tari­at for the ACs is in T&T.

More re­cent­ly, the Eco­nom­ic Part­ner­ship Agree­ment (EPA) be­tween CAR­I­FO­RUM (Cari­com and the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic) and the Eu­ro­pean Union was signed and rat­i­fied in Ju­ly 2015. T&T has al­so ne­go­ti­at­ed sev­er­al par­tial-scope agree­ments; with Pana­ma, El Sal­vador, Guatemala and Chile. Al­so, there has been a re­cent em­pha­sis (in words if, not in deeds) on cre­at­ing the Caribbean Sin­gle Mar­ket and econ­o­my.

These arrange­ments are in­tend­ed to widen ex­port mar­ket ac­cess for do­mes­tic man­u­fac­tur­ers. Latin Amer­i­ca of­fers a po­ten­tial mar­ket of 600 mil­lion peo­ple who speak two lan­guages com­pared to the EU’s 448 mil­lion with sev­er­al dif­fer­ent lan­guages. These trade agree­ments are cur­rent­ly un­der­utilised, the trade fig­ures are low and the bal­ance of trade is neg­a­tive with most coun­tries in these agree­ments. Since the ob­jec­tive must be to in­crease ex­ports, the ques­tion is in what ar­eas and how will this lead to the de­vel­op­ment and trans­fer of knowl­edge and tech­nol­o­gy as dis­tinct from mere job cre­ation and some to­ken lo­cal con­tent rule.

At the open­ing of the Phoenix Park In­dus­tri­al Es­tate, the Trade Min­is­ter not­ed that 18 new in­vest­ments amount­ing to $485 mil­lion and cre­at­ing 861 new jobs were com­mit­ted to the es­tate. The Prime Min­is­ter spoke of it at­tract­ing “new busi­ness ideas, new busi­ness mod­els, and new prod­ucts and ser­vices” pre­sum­ably for ex­port. What is the link be­tween the Vi­sion doc­u­ments and the eight sec­tors iden­ti­fied for growth and Phoenix Park? Are these sec­tors grow­ing or have these sec­tors been aban­doned?

By com­par­i­son, E Tech’s Tamana Park re­mains un­der­de­vel­oped and the link with re­search and de­vel­op­ment is non-func­tion­al. UTT’s Cou­va cam­pus and many vo­ca­tion­al train­ing sites are close to the Phoenix Park In­dus­tri­al Es­tate. Will there be a link be­tween them that could lead to some re­al trans­fer of tech­no­log­i­cal know-how to na­tion­als? If there is none, what will fa­cil­i­tate the tran­si­tion away from hy­dro­car­bons?  Suc­cess re­quires align­ment of poli­cies and ac­tions.  Build­ing phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture is on­ly one step.  

Mar­i­ano Browne is the Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer of the Arthur Lok Jack Glob­al School of Busi­ness. ALJGSB is a not-for-prof­it cor­po­ra­tion.