00:00What I've noticed is that the underemployment rate in Trinidad and Tobago, using Table 34,
00:07cut off the CSO data on CSSP, is that underemployment in Trinidad and Tobago
00:15has been on the rise. Now, this is something that we should be concerned about, in particular,
00:21because unemployment is also on the rise. Professor Roger Hossain says, based on
00:26information he received from the CSO on the labor force, there is a great need for concern
00:32about the rise in underemployment and unemployment in TNT. People are working less hours likely
00:38because of the decline in economic activity. Some firms, instead of being able to offer their
00:45workers 40 hours, now try to structure their labor force in a way that they say, if I have
00:52five workers, I won't send everybody home. I would give one day off, one day and a half off during
00:58the week to each one of you all, so our wage bill would fall, but everybody will still get a dollar
01:03so they can buy a bread. He says, now that there's a rise in unemployment, there's a gap in the
01:08economy that needs to be filled. The way macroeconomics guides the economy is we try to
01:15minimize unemployment and we try to optimally deploy all the resources at our disposal,
01:22so when you have an economy in which you have more unemployment and rising underemployment,
01:30it means that you can't produce at the boundary of what you are capable, and therefore there is a gap
01:38between what you can optimally produce and what you are producing, and that's the output gap in
01:44some sense then. That's the output gap in the economy. Professor Hosein laments that the number
01:49one factor that is inhibiting economic progress in this country is crime. If we can fix this crime
01:55situation, I'm going to use some crude numbers, bring the murders from an estimated 615 this year
02:03down to about 200 and significantly increase our police patrol and reduce violent crime and home
02:11invasions together with, of course, other interventions by the state, for example, the ADB
02:18perhaps being recapitalized and making more loans more available and
02:27strategies in which we use to encourage big firms to invest more in rural areas. For example,
02:32if we can get Bermudas to set up an establishment in Mayaro or in the southwest peninsula,
02:38like type of investment where we get the giant firms making billions of dollars
02:43to invest in other parts of the country, we could get the economy moving forward.
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