State set on boosting economy

PRIME Minister Peter O’Neill says the Government is committed to making the economy stronger.
He told the Consultative Implementation and Monitoring Council National Development forum in Port Moresby yesterday that the national debt level was within the acceptable limit and the Gross Domestic Product had doubled over the past five to six years.
“A lot of our citizens and our partners feel that we are borrowing too much money to try and build the infrastructure and provide these services,” he said.
“Although we have depressed commodity prices globally, our economy is continuing to grow. We are now on target, our debts levels are within the physical responsibility sect. GDP is doing quite well.”
O’Neill said the Government had to make a deliberate decision to expand the budget capacity by going into a deficit.
“We are not the only country in the world that goes into deficit. We are not as bad as many other countries in the world,” he said.
“There are some things we cannot help and control like commodity prices but we can manage our budget. We can manage what we are doing.
“We had a huge deficit in 2012 but it was a deliberate strategy where we were trying to reduce the deficit levels from close to five per cent to a balanced budget in 2018 or 2019.”