Govt must heed Bakani’s warning
FOR most of the first decade of this century, lady luck, and the Christian among us would say God, has been smiling upon Papua New Guinea. Between 2003 and 2012, the economy has been growing in leaps and bounds. For the first time too, a global economic crisis failed to put a damper on PNG’s economic fortunes. In that time the budget has grown in size from a mere K1 billion to K10 billion and it is growing. For most of those years of plenty, the government has had to bring down two or three supplementary budgets to factor in revenue in excess of budget forecasts. The global economy is expected to remain weak in 2013 reflecting the ongoing debt crisis in the Euro zone and slow recovery in the rest of the advanced economies such as Japan and the United States. Despite that, PNG’s economic fortunes continue untrammelled. Although the economic growth is forecasted to shrink from 9% to 4% this year, this is far bigger growth than PNG has experienced since 1975 when annual growth, whenever