The annual reading of the Budget is a ritual. It is real only in that it determines what will be the cost of living in the short and medium term. This year it imposed additional taxes intended to replace evaporated energy sector revenue in order to prop up a lifestyle, …
Read More »What gets measured gets done: Our problem with analysing Budgets and Gov’t data
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” This is one of the first quotes you learn when trying to understand Monitoring and Evaluation. Given current realities in Trinidad and Tobago, it seems applicable. I recently finished reviewing the National Budgets presented during the period …
Read More »AV Room: e-CON-omics 101: Budgeting should be from bottom up, not top down
So the Finance Minister’s budget presentation is over; we all now know the major highlights. I make no apologies for not offering any red or yellow-tinted responses or comments or analyses. I want to break with the sterile ‘This was good’ and ‘That was bad’ tradition and discuss instead what …
Read More »Dear editor: Our budgets lack originality and our Finance Ministers don’t understand ‘diversification’
I stopped watching many TV shows and movies a long time ago because they have apparently run out of ideas and are in the habit of using old shows and scripts—that worked sometime in the past—to see if they would work now. I am now convinced that I should also …
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