FINANCE Minister Colm Imbert has announced a pay increase for public-sector workers, measures to benefit other groups, fight crime and ensure continued economic growth in the face of revenue challenges over the next two years.
Imbert presented the $59.7 billion 2024/2025 budget in a five-hour and 44-minute presentation in the House of Representatives on September 30.
The budget was based on an oil price of US$77.80 per barrel and a natural gas price of US$3.59 per mmbtu.
Last year’s budget was based on an oil price of US$85 per barrel and a natural gas price of US$5 per mmbtu in 2024. The budget’s projected revenue and the fiscal deficit are $54.224 billion and $5.517 billion respectively.
Imbert said the latter is 2.91 per cent of GDP (gross domestic product), again within the international benchmark of three per cent.
The education, health, national security, public utilities, works and transport, rural development and local government, agriculture and housing ministries received some of the largest allocations in the budget.
Imbert told MPs the budget stands is a testament to Trinidad and Tobago’s resilience despite the formidable challenges it has faced over the past nine years.
He identified the covid19 pandemic and poor economic management by the UNC-led People’s Partnership (PP) government as two of those challenges.
On the former, he continued, many of the PNM’s political opponents hoped TT would not recover from the pandemic.
“We not only rebounded, but our economy is stronger and more resilient now than it was before covid19. Indeed, by 2023, just three years after the arrival of the covid19 virus, government revenue had improved by $19.4 billion, when compared to 2020, an increase of 56 per cent.”
Even this year, with severely reduced oil and gas prices and declining local energy production, Imbert said government revenue “is still $3.6 billion more, or eight per cent more, than it was in 2019.”
[caption id="attachment_1111895" align="alignnone" width="1024"] These protesters braved early-afternoon showers in Port of Spain on Monday to show their dissatisfaction with the Government as Finance Minister Colm Imbert presented the 2024/2025 budget in Parliament. - Photo by Ayanna Kinsale[/caption]
On the latter, Imbert said poor economic strategies by the PP caused a major energy company to tell the incoming PNM government in September 2015 that TT would get “no income from them for nine years, until 2024.”
He added that thanks to the efforts of the Prime Minister and Energy Minister Stuart Young from 2015 to now, that scenario was corrected through initiatives such as a restructured Atlantic LNG (ALNG), allowing TT to gain more revenues from that company, and cross-border energy initiatives such as the Dragon and Cocuina-Manakin projects.
Imbert said the new arrangements for ALNG, which has TT holding ten per cent shareholding in the company’s trains two, three and four through the National Gas Company (NGC), take effect from October 1.
Dr Rowley made this announcement at a f
