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CCNTV6
  • 1 year ago
There is an increase in underemployment and unemployment in Trinidad and Tobago says economist, Professor Roger Hosein.


He says this needs to be reversed if the economy is to move forward, but notes that crime is the biggest challenge to achieving this.


He was speaking on Tv6's Morning Edition.
Transcript
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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