Keith Rowley became Prime Minister on September 9, 2015, inheriting an economy that had just begun to contract after the commodity supercycle ended. He left office on May 1, 2025, handing his successor an economy that had contracted in seven of those eleven years. GDP per capita fell from approximately US$22,074 in 2014 to roughly US$19,684 by 2025 - a decline of 10.8 percent. Foreign reserves dropped from US$11.5 billion to US$5.3 billion, a loss of 54 percent. The Heritage and Stabilisation Fund received no deposits after September 2013. Moody's downgraded Trinidad and Tobago five notches, from Baa1 to Ba2 - junk status. S&P downgraded five notches, from A to BBB-.
These are not opposition talking points. They are the numbers. No period since independence has seen this kind of sustained economic erosion.
This piece is not written to score points for the UNC. The UNC's own fiscal trajectory - a projected deficit more than double the budgeted figure, oil price assumptions already overtaken by reality, and a jobs programme that has delivered 9 percent of its target - suggests that the lessons of the lost decade have not been absorbed by either side. But if TrinbagoInsider is going to hold the current government to account, the baseline against which it is measured must be established honestly. The PNM's record from 2015 to 2025 is that baseline, and it is grim.
The Macro Picture
The top-line GDP story is one of contraction punctuated by brief, shallow recoveries. The economy shrank in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2020. It grew modestly in 2018 and 2019 before COVID-19 produced a 9.08 percent contraction in 2020 - one of the sharpest in the Caribbean. The border closure, which lasted more than two years, compounded the damage. Tourism, already a small contributor to GDP, effectively ceased. Small businesses that depended on cross-border trade with Venezuela and other regional markets were destroyed.
Growth returned in 2021 and 2022, driven largely by elevated energy prices following the post-COVID demand surge and the war in Ukraine. But the recovery was narrow. It flowed through energy revenue and did not translate into jobs, diversification, or private sector expansion outside the energy corridor. By the time Rowley left office, the economy was growing at less than 1 percent annually - the kind of figure that statisticians technically classify as growth and that ordinary people experience as stagnation.
The debt picture moved in one direction. Central government debt rose from TT$84.4 billion in 2015 to TT$115.4 billion by the end of the PNM's tenure - an increase of 36.8 percent. The debt-to-GDP ratio climbed past 60 percent, the level at which international financial institutions begin to express concern, and settled near 68 percent. When state enterprise borrowing is included, the total public sector debt exceeds 84 percent of GDP.
The Energy Collapse
Trinidad and Tobago's economy has been built on hydrocarbons for decades. The PNM did not create the country's dependence on oil and gas. But the decline in production that occurred on its watch was severe, and the policy responses were insufficient.
Oil production fell from approximately 80,000 barrels per day in 2015 to roughly 60,000 bpd by 2025 - a decline of 25 percent. Gas production dropped from approximately 3.5 billion cubic feet per day to around 2.3 bcf/d, a 34 percent fall. Atlantic LNG's Train 1 was permanently decommissioned in early 2025 because there was not enough gas to justify operating it. The downstream petrochemical complex at Point Lisas, built on the assumption of abundant cheap feedstock gas, began to hollow out. Nutrien's shutdown at the start of 2026 - triggered by a dispute with NGC over pricing and retroactive fees - was the most visible casualty, but the underlying trend had been building for years.
The Petrotrin closure in November 2018 was the PNM's most consequential energy decision. The state oil company was haemorrhaging money - that much was not in dispute. Three flagship projects had run cost overruns of 314 percent, 174 percent, and 265 percent. The refinery at Pointe-a-Pierre was producing at a fraction of capacity. But the closure displaced over 5,000 workers and eliminated the country's domestic refining capability entirely. Heritage Petroleum, the successor company, inherited the upstream assets. The Guaracara refinery has sat idle for nearly eight years. The promise of a new operator has not materialised.
The decision to close Petrotrin rather than restructure it remains one of the most debated choices of the Rowley administration. There were arguments on both sides. What is not debatable is the outcome: Trinidad and Tobago went from a country that refined its own crude to one that imports all its fuel. Whether the closure was necessary austerity or industrial vandalism depends on your assumptions about what a reformed Petrotrin might have looked like. The government never presented a public restructuring plan to compare against the shutdown.
The Reserves and the Fund
The foreign reserves tell the fiscal story in concentrated form. US$11.5 billion in 2015. US$5.3 billion by 2025. That is 54 percent gone in a decade - spent on defending an exchange rate that increasingly cannot be defended, on covering fiscal shortfalls that energy revenue no longer fills, and on maintaining a standard of government expenditure that the revenue base no longer supports.
The Heritage and Stabilisation Fund was designed for precisely this scenario - a buffer against commodity price shocks and production declines. It held approximately US$6.38 billion as of early 2026. That sounds substantial until you consider that the last deposit was made in September 2013. For more than a decade, through periods of both high and low energy prices, no government - PNM or UNC - contributed a single dollar. The PNM withdrew US$2.8 billion from the fund in fiscal 2025 alone, consuming more than 60 percent of the fund's investment returns for the year.
A sovereign wealth fund that receives no deposits and faces regular withdrawals is not a savings mechanism. It is a drawdown account with a dignified name.
The Rating Agencies
Credit ratings are blunt instruments. They compress the complexity of a national economy into a letter grade. But when two independent agencies move in the same direction over the same period, the signal is difficult to dismiss.
Moody's entered the Rowley era with Trinidad and Tobago at Baa1 - solidly investment grade. By the time the PNM left office, the rating had fallen five notches to Ba2, which is junk. That means Moody's concluded that lending money to Trinidad and Tobago carries speculative risk. S&P tracked a parallel path, moving from A to BBB- over the same period. Both agencies cited the same factors: falling energy output, widening deficits, a narrow economic base, and poorly governed state enterprises.
Under the UNC, both agencies have since shifted their outlooks to negative - indicating the possibility of further downgrades. The trajectory has not reversed. It has slowed, perhaps, but the structural conditions that drove the downgrades remain in place.
COVID-19 as Context, Not Excuse
The 2020 contraction - 9.08 percent - was the single worst year in the decade. COVID-19 was a genuine external shock. No government, of any composition, would have avoided a contraction. The border closure, while extreme in duration, had defensible public health rationale in the early months when vaccines did not yet exist and the health system was fragile.
But COVID arrived in 2020. The decline began in 2015. The economy had already contracted in three of the five pre-pandemic years. Oil production was already falling. Reserves were already declining. Moody's had already begun downgrading. COVID made everything worse, but it did not cause the structural deterioration. A government that presided over four years of contraction before the pandemic cannot attribute all ten years of decline to it.
The comparison with regional peers sharpens this point. Jamaica, which entered the pandemic with a smaller economy and no energy resources, had already implemented painful fiscal reforms under an IMF programme that both political parties supported. The result was a series of credit upgrades. Barbados restructured its debt under Mia Mottley - a wrenching process that involved defaulting on bondholders - and emerged with a credible fiscal path that the rating agencies acknowledged. Guyana, which began exporting oil in 2019, grew 43 percent in 2020 while the rest of the world contracted. Trinidad and Tobago had none of these advantages - but it also made none of these choices.
What Did Work
The PNM did accomplish things. The Solomon Hochoy Highway extension to Point Fortin, after years of delays and cost overruns, was substantially completed. The Brechin Castle solar farm - the country's first utility-scale renewable energy project - moved from RFP through construction under the PNM, with commissioning falling to the incoming UNC government. Legislative reforms in anti-money laundering and financial sector regulation contributed to the eventual removal from the EU's blacklist, though the final step occurred under the UNC. The financial sector was recapitalised, and the banking system remained stable throughout the decade.
None of that is trivial. But a highway does not replace lost GDP, and legislative compliance does not create jobs. The accomplishments exist alongside the decline without altering it.
The Murder Count
Murders rose from 410 in 2015 to 624 in 2024 - an increase of 52 percent. The PNM government deployed States of Emergency, special anti-crime units, enhanced stop-and-search powers, and a series of legislative measures. None produced a sustained reduction. The murder rate climbed steadily for most of the decade, with brief dips that reversed the following year.
The UNC inherited a country where over 600 murders a year had become ordinary. The 42 percent reduction in murders during 2025 - achieved largely through emergency powers - is the most visible contrast between the two administrations. Whether that reduction is durable remains an open question, with Q1 2026 tracking 29 percent above the same period in 2025.
Vision 2030 and the Question of Plans
The PNM government published Vision 2030, a development strategy that outlined goals for economic diversification, human capital development, institutional modernisation, and environmental sustainability. By 2025, most of the measurable targets remained unmet. Non-energy sector growth did not accelerate. The manufacturing base did not expand. The tourism sector did not develop into a significant revenue stream. The digital economy framework remained largely aspirational.
Vision 2030 was not poorly conceived. It was simply never executed. The government published a strategy and then spent a decade responding to crises instead of following through on it.
The Question Neither Party Wants to Answer
Did the PNM squander a decade? The numbers suggest that it did - not through one catastrophic decision, but through ten years of reacting to events rather than shaping them, of underinvesting in the productive economy, and of failing to move away from an energy sector that was visibly shrinking. Each year was slightly worse than the last, with occasional recoveries that proved temporary.
But the harder question is whether the UNC's current trajectory suggests it has learned anything from the experience. The Budget Scorecard shows oil price assumptions already overtaken by market reality. The Promise Tracker shows a jobs programme delivering a fraction of its commitments. The IMF projects a deficit more than double the government's own estimate. Finance Minister Tancoo's description of the IMF's analysis as requiring a "bold rejection" does not suggest the gravity of the situation has landed.
Trinidad and Tobago does not have another decade to lose. The energy sector is contracting. The reserves are depleting. The credit rating is deteriorating. Guyana is producing next door at volumes that make Trinidad and Tobago's output look like a rounding error. The window for structural reform is narrowing with every budget cycle that defers hard choices in favour of political convenience.
The PNM's lost decade is the baseline. The question is whether what comes next will be different, or whether the country will look back at the 2020s with the same combination of regret and disbelief that now attaches to the 2010s.
The numbers do not care which party holds office. They just keep getting worse.
Sources
- IMF: Trinidad and Tobago 2026 Article IV Mission Concluding Statement (February 2026)
- IMF: World Economic Outlook Database - Trinidad and Tobago GDP per capita (2014-2025)
- Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago: Annual Economic Surveys (2015-2025)
- Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago: Gross Official Reserves data (2015-2025)
- Ministry of Finance: Heritage and Stabilisation Fund Quarterly Reports (2013-2025)
- Moody's Investors Service: Trinidad and Tobago sovereign rating history (2015-2025)
- S&P Global Ratings: Trinidad and Tobago sovereign rating history (2015-2025)
- Ministry of Energy and Energy Industries: Production data - oil and gas (2015-2025)
- Trinidad Express: "$2.8B withdrawn from HSF in 2025"
- Trinidad Guardian: "National Recruitment Drive falls short: 20,000 jobs promised, 1,801 people hired" (February 2026)
- Trinidad and Tobago Police Service: Annual crime statistics (2015-2025)
- Ministry of Planning and Development: Vision 2030 National Development Strategy
- World Bank: Trinidad and Tobago economic indicators (2015-2025)
- EY Trinidad: Focus on Trinidad and Tobago Budget 2026
- ECLAC: Economic Survey of the Caribbean 2025
- Pipeline & Gas Journal: "Trinidad's Atlantic LNG Plans Q4 Decommissioning of Train 1" (January 2026)