Colm Imbert: “No IMF for Trinidad & Tobago”

Finance minister Colm Imbert said that almost 25 years after Trinidad & Tobago extricated itself from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Rowley’s led Government has no intention of returning to what he described as ‘the same old sterile measures from 1990, focused on contraction without due consideration for the short and long term effects on citizens’. Minister Imbert was speaking on the theme “Restructuring a Commodity dependent Economy for Growth without External Intervention.
Imbert said for the most part this country’s monetary policy was focused on a stabilisation program with emphasis on restricting domestic demand and restoring external balance. He added the decline in government expenditure created considerable social and economic pressure especially among the most vulnerable income groups in the country.
The Finance Minister however said that Trinidad & Tobago benefited from a consultation visit from the IMF in 2015, and proposals from many interest groups had a common theme inclusive of implementing property tax, expanding the tax base, more effective tax collection and increasing personal and corporate taxation.
Imbert said although the present PNM government inherited a challenging situation in 2015, the government decided not to go back to the IMF, noting that “bling adherence to this severe model of structural adjustment at the expense of human capital was not a road the we as a country wished to travel again”.