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The last three ar­ti­cles, “No easy way to fix strate­gic er­rors”, “Find­ing the right Pol­i­cy mix” and “Trans­form­ing a so­ci­ety” pro­vid­ed a brief com­par­i­son be­tween Sin­ga­pore’s de­vel­op­ment ex­pe­ri­ence and that of Trinidad and To­ba­go. In re­sponse, a for­mer gov­ern­ment min­is­ter ar­gued that the com­par­isons pro­vid­ed valu­able in­sight in­to Sin­ga­pore but did not di­rect­ly ad­dress T&T’s fail­ings. In rephras­ing his com­ment, he asked, “Does Trinidad and To­ba­go have an eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy? And if yes, what is it?”

The short an­swer is that since 1974, every T&T gov­ern­ment has re­lied on the en­er­gy sec­tor to dri­ve eco­nom­ic growth and has re­dis­trib­uted the en­er­gy rents de­rived to the rest of the econ­o­my. This pol­i­cy ex­plains why the econ­o­my has os­cil­lat­ed be­tween boom and bust. The di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion ef­fort has nev­er been giv­en the con­sis­tent em­pha­sis it de­served. The pro­mo­tion of man­u­fac­tur­ing was not based on a co­her­ent pol­i­cy mix that en­abled pos­i­tive re­in­force­ment. The re­sult has been in­di­vid­ual suc­cess­es that are too weak to de­throne the en­er­gy sec­tor as the econ­o­my’s dy­namo. Fur­ther, even though we boast of the skill sets de­vel­oped in the en­er­gy sec­tor, we have not ap­plied those learn­ings to oth­er in­dus­tries.

The lessons learnt in de­vel­op­ing the petro­chem­i­cal in­dus­try, the key role played by na­tion­als in de­vel­op­ing this sec­tor, or the mis­takes made, are large­ly un­doc­u­ment­ed. Abun­dant nat­ur­al gas does not ad­e­quate­ly ex­plain why Trinidad and To­ba­go be­came the world’s sec­ond-largest ex­porter of am­mo­nia. That sto­ry is en­twined with for­eign di­rect in­vest­ment and a cadre of home­grown en­gi­neers who cut their teeth in solv­ing the process is­sues at WR Grace, who went on to de­vel­op the back­bone of the petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor. Po­lit­i­cal short-sight­ed­ness led to the loss of what should have been a flag­ship of T&T’s in­dus­tri­al ca­pac­i­ty: CLI­CO En­er­gy, now part of the Pro­man Group.