THREE senior economists said on Thursday that decades of subsidies, transfers and other forms of government assistance – to the tune of tens of billions of dollars – have made citizens spoilt.

This view comes three days after the Minister of Finance Colm Imbert announced in the budget, a further cut on subsidies in the price of fuel and consequent increase in the price of premium and super gasoline, each by a dollar per litre, and 50 cents per litre for diesel.

Economists Dr Dave Seerattan, Dr Darren Conrad and Dr Marlene Attzs, spoke during a post budget virtual forum hosted the Department of Economics, Faculty of Social Science, University of the West Indies, St Augustine campus.

All agreed that after years of support from successive governments, citizens are now facing, if only in part, the actual real cost of many commodities.

"In some countries, with less resources available, there is a different mindset altogether," said Conrad. "They are able to make tough decisions and implement some of these measures. But it doesn’t fly here because we have become, for want of a better word, spoilt over the years.

DEPENDENCY SYNDROME

Attzs agreed saying, “What has happened for us for 60 years is that successive governments have created a dependency syndrome."

“I think our country and its citizens need to understand what constitutes TT’s wealth. It is incumbent on us as a department to help with that conversation in terms of educating the population so when budget day happens people have a better platform in which they would be able to receive the information and have some kind of understanding of what is happening in the country.”

Seerattan said that in years past, TT has experienced “supernormal” profits from energy sales and revenues, but times have changed and revenue and production are not what they used to be.

“Those times may come again but right now we are not in that position,” he said.

“The problem with the fuels subsidy is that it is not sustainable in the long term. If you didn’t have the subsidies, you would have been able to do what Barbados is doing and offer assistance to people to meet their fuel and food bills – but we have subsidies in place already.”

[caption id="attachment_977898" align="alignnone" width="244"] Economist Marlene Attzs who also believes citizens have grown spoilt on government grants and subsidies. FILE PHOTO -[/caption]

Their views of society being spoilt by decades of government assistance, grants and subsidies, comes amid major condemnation on social media, of a call by Sport Minister Shamfa Cudjoe for greater sacrifices to be made by people.

With the thinking that the fuel subsidy would sooner or later become unsustainable, Seerattan said there was an overall logic to what Imbert did in reducing government subsidies on the price of fuel.

“If you had been looking at what the minister has been doing over a period of time, he has consistently scaled back the fuel subsidy. I believe any minister of finance finding himself in the position that he (Imbert) did