A member of the Economic Development Advisory Board is predicting a significant increase in T&T’s unemployment rate from four per cent to 15 per cent this year. Professor Karl Theodore explained that the country’s employment is aligned to the energy sector and he drew a comparison to the last major recession in 1982 when unemployment went from 11 per cent to 22 per cent.
Theodore, who spoke at the first meeting of the T&T Bipartite Forum at the Kapok Hotel in Port-of-Spain yesterday, said: “The country has to make up its mind that it will not link its employment levels...its current standard of living is not to be linked with those energy (sector) earners.
“If earnings are clipped with the energy earnings then what you are saying is when the earnings go down, we are prepared to go down with it.”
He also suggested that T&T follow its Caricom counterparts and implement an unemployment insurance scheme, but warned that if not implemented properly it could threaten the entire system. He said, however, that there is no harm in “starting the conversation.”
“If you know for sure that there will be people without a job...we have to be our brother’s keeper...We have to be smart as to how to set up an unemployment scheme in this country that does not put the National Insurance Board in trouble,” he said.