Lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Dr Marlene Attz, is calling on the Government to do a proper evaluation of the Gate programme to ensure proper returns on investment. She was speaking at the T&T Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors’ post-budget forum at the Cara Suites hotel, Claxton Bay, on Wednesday. Attz, who is a founding member of the Sustainable Economic Development Unit (SEDU), a specialised research unit in the Department of Economics, said in other countries of the world students were given a means test to determine eligibility for social programmes similar to Gate.
Saying that Gate was an investment in human capital, Attz said there was currently no assessment of whether the students who benefitted from Gate were making a positive contribution to T&T. “I wonder what kind of rates or return on investment that the government is realising,” she asked of the Gate programme. “The minister said 67,000 people have access to Gate but how many of them are using their education to benefit the nation,” Attz added.
She also noted that Government’s debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio had risen from 33.4 per cent in 2012 to 40 per cent in 2014. While she contended that “nothing is wrong with a deficit budget,” Attz said, “the success of a deficit budget depends on whether there are productive investments which contribute to the positive development.” She outlined several concerns with the 2014/2015 fiscal budget, including possible inflationary increases, the impact of increases in subsidies, high youth under-employment and the need for diversification. She also noted that nothing was said about property taxes, which have not been collected since 2010.
Quoting Government’s statistics of a 3.6 unemployment rate, Attz said her concern was the high rate of under employment, which is between eight per cent and ten per cent. She also said that T&T had placed fourth in terms of development, trailing behind Barbados, Bahamas and Grenada, in that order. She also said that $15 was not sufficient as a minimum wage, adding that Government had to assess the potential inflationary impact it would have on the economy. She said the developmental impact of the social programmes offered by the Government also had to be assessed. Also speaking at the function were president of the San Fernando Business Association Daphne Bartlett and UTT chairman Curtis Manchoon.