Economy has progressed, says Marape

National

By LULU MAGINDE
PRIME Minister James Marape says the country has risen from a K5 billion economy in 1975 to a K100 billion economy in 2022.
Back from a trip to Brisbane as guest speaker at the 37th Australia-PNG Business forum, Marape said when his government took over, it had inherited a K79.4 billion economy and had raised its value to a K100 billion economy with experts predicting a rise further at year’s end.
Marape said the talk was centred on bringing investors in the country to develop its raw materials and process them for international markets.
He invited investors to join with Papua New Guinea on its journey.
According to Marape over the next seven years, PNG would aggressively pursue downstream processing and adding value to its resources and as much as possible there would be no more exporting of raw materials.
“PNG has the largest concentration of Australian owned businesses, they were offered the first opportunity to go into the downstream sector with us and I think they appreciated the conversation,” he said.
“As a nation we’ve rose from a K5 billion economy to a K100 billion economy in the last 46 years, still maintaining robustness of our democracy, independence of our judiciary and fabric of our constitution.”
This was their first face-to-face meeting after months of virtual meetings as he remarked that nothing beat face-to-face contact, especially when one was trying to sell the country as an investment destination.