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Tourism arrivals into Fiji will decline by 3.3 percent for 2009, estimates Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Queensland, Renuka Mahadevan.
Mahadevan authored last year’s Economic Survey on Fiji in which she stated Fiji had been in stagnant waters for sometime and was swimming in the wrong direction.
Speaking at the Economic Update 2009 at the University of the South Pacific in Suva today, she said that with the global economic crisis and the situation in Fiji, tourist numbers have not been as strong as previous years with many hotels not recording a good occupancy rate.
Mahadevan added that sugar needed to be relooked at as more reforms were needed in the agricultural sector with sugar’s contribution to GDP declining from 13.1 percent to six percent.
She said there was also a need to look at other agricultural sectors because the collapse of either sugar or tourism, the main contributors to the Fiji economy, could weaken Fiji.
The recent boost to the ICT sector was noted as a good way forward for Fiji but Mahadevan has warned that Fiji should be careful when dealing with the ICT sector.
She said Malaysia has had a boost in the sector but was not doing well. The human resource index in the ICT sector in Fiji was only 54 out of 137, “quite a low figure”.
According to Mahadevan, the high prices of getting telephone and internet services did not help Fiji’s developing ICT sector either.
“Fiji’s prices are 2.7 times higher than Malaysia and 5.8 times higher than that of Australia.”
Mahadevan ended her presentation by saying that good governance was needed to have any improvements in the Fiji economy.
She said that things like poverty alleviation need to be looked at and estimated that poverty in the nation would increase to 41 percent this year compared to 34.4 percent last year.
