President Bharrat Jagdeo said this year’s National Budget will feature an expansion of infrastructure, supporting economic activity, and continued and improved services to Guyanese.
“You’ll also see a dedicated effort to raise the quality of services that we bring to our people,” Jagdeo told a media conference on Monday, January 10th. “We can do this largely because we are doing better as a country, at least economic-wise.”
As such, the 2011 National Budget is expected to be bigger than last year’s, which was announced at Gy$142.8 billion. It focused mainly on improving the social sectors to ensure that needs of Guyanese are met. But, during the year, government approached the National Assembly for approval of four supplementary budgets, which pushed total government spending to more than Gy$155 billion. The opposition then questioned why these projects were not catered for in the initial budget — a question that was raised again to the president.
He explained that these programmes are covered by increased revenue during the year.
“If the revenue does a bit better, we also push more of those programmes. Only in December, a Gy$3 billion supplementary budget was approved by the house to be spent on the development (of) new and existing housing schemes. This was only made possible through an increase in economic activity over the last year”, Jagdeo outlined.
Government is making available some 15,000 house lots at the back of the Guyana National Stadium, Providence, East Bank Demerara. “This will allow us to fix 500/600 more roads than we anticipated, and to accelerate the housing drive so more of our people can have their house lots faster.”
According to the head of state, most of the businesses he spoke with ended 2010 significantly better than the previous year. “We saw, from tax collection, a significant increase in economic activities,” he added. This conclusion was made only on the basis of tax collection, since the tax rates were not increased during the year. “It had to have come from stronger enforcement (of tax collection) and a significant expansion in economic activities.”
Based on the trends in the mid-year report, Guyana’s economy was poised to exceed previous years’ growth. The inflation rate at the end of the first half of 2010 was two per cent, driven primarily by movement in the food category; and, based on developments during this period, the inflation target has been revised to 4.5 per cent from the 4 per cent predicted at the time of the National Budget.
Traditional sectors, such as rice, forestry and gold, continued to be important drivers of this growth, with favourable performances being recorded in other sectors, such as construction, information and communication, health, and social services.
Government maintains that the favourable performance of the domestic economy demonstrates the strong underlying fundamentals on which the economy is built, and reflects gains made over the years at diversifying the sources of growth.
These results point to continued fulfilment of government’s ongoing commitment to prudent and stable macroeconomic policies, and to strengthening Guyana’s economic base through modernisation and diversification along a low carbon path.
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