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The Asian Development Bank is taking a conservative view to Fiji’s medium term economic prospects, saying it would prefer to see results before it puts a positive spin on things.
ADB’s public financial management specialist Laisiasa Tora told Fiji Live that while there were many reforms on the government’s agenda, fundamental aspects of the economy were still weak.
“What we’re saying is the economy has been performing quite poorly for a long time now and the impact of the global economic crisis has just exacerbated the worsening performance.
“One of the reasons why the economy has not been performing well is among other things, political instability and underlying structural weaknesses in the economy which the authorities, to be fair, are trying to address now,” Tora said.
“State-owned enterprises take a huge chunk of government’s finances and could contribute by lifting investment levels to the 25 percent that Fiji is targeting but these enterprises have been performing very poorly.
“The government and the private sector can only do so much given the current economic situation and if SOEs don’t come to the table, Fiji is not likely to achieve the 25 percent investment target that it would like to.”
He said given these and many other challenges that Fiji is faced with, the ADB has taken a conservative view of Fiji’s prospects in the medium term.
“What we’re saying is all these factors combined mean that Fiji’s medium term prospects, in our view, aren’t as positives as maybe the authorities are saying.
“We are taking a very conservative view. And we’re saying these things really need to get going - they have all these structural reform measures, they have all these reforms that they’d like to get going but these things really need to get going if we’re going to see some of the flow on effects and some of the benefits and achieve some of the level of growth that the government is talking about,” Tora said.
Tora was one of the speakers at the joint Fiji/Australia Business Council and Australia/Fiji Business Council meeting currently underway in Natadola, which is being attended by over 100 people from the business and diplomatic communities.
