SUVA, Jan. 10 (Xinhua) -- Fiji's economic growth in the recent past has been fueled by development in a slew of sectors rather a single factor, a high-ranking Fijian official said Thursday.
"The main drivers include agriculture, tourism, financial services, manufacturing, wholesale and retail, fisheries, construction and mining and quarrying. Other sectors contribute positively as well," said Filimone Waqabaca, permanent secretary of Fiji's Ministry of Finance.
Waqabaca was rejecting claims by a member of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) that Fiji's growth projections were not as high as envisaged by the Fijian government but would be in fact 1 percent less at 1.7 percent rather than 2.7 percent.
While questioning the methodology used by the bank to arrive at this figure, Waqabaca said the ADB was pegging tourism as the driver of the economy, when it was broad based since 2011. After a period of marginal growth of 0.1 percent in 2010, majority of the sectors have contributed to the growth.
Waqabaca said the ADB had been challenged to reveal on how they arrived at Fiji's gross domestic product (GDP) growth figure but there had been no feedback from the bank on their methodology.
"Whether it was based on a forecasting model or just simply discounting the forecast growth number announced by the Macroeconomic Forecasting Committee in Fiji, which has an established forecasting methodology," he said.
According to Waqabaca, in 2011, Fiji's projection of 2 percent growth was almost on par with the forecast by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but the ADB's predictions were lower at 0.5 to 1 percent. Fiji's official GDP growth for 2011 was 1.9 percent.
|
