T&T’s decades-long com­mit­ment to Cari­com as a ve­hi­cle for eco­nom­ic growth is be­ing sharply re­assessed by econ­o­mist Dr Vanus James, who says the coun­try’s in­te­gra­tion strat­e­gy—built on ex­pand­ing re­gion­al mar­kets for man­u­fac­tur­ing—has not de­liv­ered the ex­pect­ed re­sults and now re­quires ur­gent re­think­ing.

T&T’s suc­cess­ful elec­tion to a non-per­ma­nent seat on the Unit­ed Na­tions Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil is be­ing hailed as both a diplo­mat­ic break­through and a po­ten­tial eco­nom­ic turn­ing point, with Gov­ern­ment and Am­cham T&T point­ing to new op­por­tu­ni­ties for in­vest­ment, trade and in­ter­na­tion­al in­flu­ence.

It is abun­dant­ly clear that the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny of T&T (NGC), over its 51 years of ex­is­tence, has done a very good job in max­imis­ing the val­ue of the coun­try’s nat­ur­al gas re­sources for the cit­i­zens of the coun­try. Both ma­jor po­lit­i­cal par­ties that have gov­erned since in­de­pen­dence are ful­ly aligned on the val­ue-adding role of the NGC. How­ev­er, as ex­pect­ed, each par­ty would claim that they have done a bet­ter job un­der their stew­ard­ship in max­imis­ing the val­ue.

The Trinidad and To­ba­go Ag­gre­gate Pro­duc­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (TTA­PA) has thrown its sup­port be­hind the Min­istry of En­er­gy’s de­ci­sion to is­sue hold-over let­ters to quar­ry op­er­a­tors, fol­low­ing a meet­ing with En­er­gy Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal and se­nior min­istry of­fi­cials in South Trinidad yes­ter­day.

For decades, T&T has been a na­tion blessed with tal­ent, nat­ur­al re­sources and en­tre­pre­neur­ial spir­it.

In a May 15 state­ment in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, Min­is­ter of Land and Le­gal Af­fairs, Sad­dam Ho­sein, set out to ad­dress the con­cerns raised in the pub­lic, most­ly by Guardian Me­dia, about the op­er­a­tions of this coun­try’s most re­cent­ly es­tab­lished state en­ter­prise, Land­mark TT.

De­ci­sions! De­ci­sions! How do I make them? The core func­tion of a man­ag­er or en­tre­pre­neur is to make de­ci­sions. Some choic­es feel like kick­ing the tin can down the road. It may make sense, as some de­ci­sions are bet­ter made to­mor­row. Some, how­ev­er, are just keep­ing the firm from be­ing more com­pet­i­tive. While it shows up on your to-do list or cal­en­dar, it’s just a pend­ing mat­ter.

Re­silience is of­ten de­scribed as en­durance, but in pro­fes­sion­al life, it is more ac­cu­rate­ly un­der­stood as dis­ci­pline. It is the abil­i­ty to re­main ground­ed amid un­cer­tain­ty and to ex­er­cise sound judge­ment in pur­suit of mean­ing­ful out­comes.

This week’s maxi-taxi strike has cre­at­ed a fi­nan­cial wind­fall for pri­vate-hire (PH) dri­vers and ride-hail­ing com­pa­nies, even as busi­ness­es faced staffing chal­lenges, com­muters paid sub­stan­tial­ly more to reach their work­places, and con­cerns mount­ed over the wider eco­nom­ic fall­out from the trans­porta­tion dis­rup­tion.

In De­cem­ber 1996, Alan Greenspan then Fed­er­al Re­serve Chair­man, gave a speech at the Amer­i­can En­ter­prise In­sti­tute in Wash­ing­ton D.C. From that speech we now have this fa­mous and time­less quote:

The Na­tion­al In­fra­struc­ture De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (Nid­co) has been or­dered to pay over $26 mil­lion in com­pen­sa­tion to a con­tract­ing com­pa­ny, whose op­er­a­tions were dis­rupt­ed af­ter some of its land was ac­quired for the con­struc­tion of the San Fer­nan­do to Point Fortin High­way. 

Over the past sev­er­al weeks, I re­viewed mar­ket­ing cur­ric­u­la across uni­ver­si­ties and train­ing in­sti­tu­tions in Sin­ga­pore, Chi­na, In­dia, Aus­tralia, Hong Kong, Japan, and sev­er­al Caribbean coun­tries, in­clud­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go, Ja­maica, Bar­ba­dos, Guyana, the Ba­hamas, and the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic.