Central Bank expects better economic performance at end of 2019

• The Cen­tral Bank of Trinidad and To­ba­go (CBTT), in its lat­est Mon­e­tary Policy Re­port, has ex­plained that T&T’s econ­o­my can be fur­ther stim­u­lat­ed if there is an end to the in­ter­rup­tion of nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion.
• The bank ex­pressed that the Min­istry of En­er­gy ex­pects a rise in nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion to around 3.8Bn stan­dard cu­bic feet per day (bcf/d), which would aid the re­ju­ve­na­tion of down­stream re­fin­ing and strength­en the pro­duc­tion of petro­chem­i­cals.
• The CBTT con­tend­ed that LNG pro­duc­tion, which was in­ter­rupt­ed in June by main­te­nance ac­tiv­i­ty and pow­er out­ages at the At­lantic LNG fa­cil­i­ty, is like­ly to nor­malise in the sec­ond half of 2019.
• The CBTT said that the re­sponse of pri­vate in­vest­ment will be key to de­ter­min­ing how fast the non-en­er­gy econ­o­my re­cov­ers. Ac­cord­ing to pre­lim­i­nary es­ti­mates by the CBTT for the first half of 2019, ac­tiv­i­ty re­mained mod­er­ate in the non-en­er­gy sec­tor while ac­tiv­i­ty de­clined in sev­er­al cru­cial sub-sec­tors such as man­u­fac­tur­ing and con­struc­tion.

(Source: T&T Guardian)