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It’s clear there is no economic strategy for T&T

 
sgtdjones 2021-10-26 02:35:10 

It’s clear there is no economic strategy for T&T

In a paper published by the Harvard Business School the late Professor Emeritus Bruce R Scott dealt with the idea of what is a national economic strategy and why it is so important.Professor Scott simply describes it as a vision of a desired future state of the economy, a timeframe within which that state is to be achieved, and a set of policies and institutions for influencing the mobilisation and allocation of resources and for promoting their efficient utilisation.For Professor Scott such a vision must provide the frame of reference for establishing priorities for the mobilisation of resources.

If we dispassionately look at the Finance Minister Colm Imbert’s 2021/22 budget, can we honestly say that he espoused an economic strategy for the country, or where it fell in a previously articulated national economic strategy?If the Government has a coherent economic strategy then it is being missed by many.That strategy is to keep the population believing that the economic challenges that confront us are not as grim as some of those “pseudo intellectuals and anti government economists” are suggesting and that it is only the Rowley administration that knows what is best or what is the true state of play. After all if the doctor say so is so.The other political strategy is to kick the can down the road for as long as possible. So the issue of an over-valued, uncompetitive exchange rate should not be dealt with because it will cause hardship on people, even though it makes the economy uncompetitive, encourages capital flight and hurts the very economy we are trying to transform.You see Minister Imbert politics is never good economic policy.

Minister, the reason I suggested last week that attention be paid to the expenditure side of the budget is because if we have a strategy that says we must get value for money, we must cut out the corruption and cost overruns in projects. We must do feasibility studies before we build a new airport terminal in Tobago, or port in Toco, this will help us get more things done with the same expenditure. It is not about generating more revenue in this instance. It is about the more efficient use of our resources. It is not impossible to do, it is not about reinventing the wheel. The government did it already with the Curepe interchange and scored political points, why not do it across the board and score economic points?

Minister, I can tell you today that your production numbers are wrong and T&T’s crude production will not average more than 75,000 barrels of oil per day next year. Its gas production will not average more than 3.1 bcf/d and even that is a stretch. You have been consistently wrong on those numbers and I have consistently had to encourage you to face the facts that those projections are not correct. Perhaps if you look at the bpTT numbers that I shared with the country some weeks ago it may help inform a more conservative approach.In closing I think the Minister of Finance and the Minister of Everything Stuart Young should consider what the former country manager of BHP in T&T had to say about energy transition and how brutal it is likely to be.


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