5% Per Annum is Minimum Acceptable Growth Rate

The economy is now returning to its usual growth trend of around 3 per cent. We must do better than this.

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance Biman Prasad said this at the two-day Fiji Indigenous Business Council Workshop at RB Patel Harbour Point Convention Centre in Lami yesterday.

“Five per cent per annum is the minimum growth rate, that is acceptable. We need to look at what our situation is and what measures we need to take, to address them,” he said.

Mr Prasad said they planned to open the books, share information and invite the people’s participation in economic management.

Indigenous entrepreneurship 

Mr Prasad also highlighted key issues from 2023 National Economic Summit centred on indigenous entrepreneurship.

He said the challenges in the development sector, especially for indigenous businesses were:- 

• The burden of increasing costs of doing business borne by those iTaukei businesses in the rural areas, as well as to rural consumers;
• Challenges of financial discipline;
• Challenges of budgeting;
• Challenges to accessing finance/capital, infrastructure, market and support services;
• Gaps in practical/relevant skills sets and experience;
• Gaps in understanding relevant business and tax laws;
• Gaps in financial literacy and commercialisation perspectives;
• Anticipating and managing business and personal risks; and
• Bureaucracies

“A few of the successful indigenous businesses that are contributing well to the economy are Fijian Holdings Limited, the iTaukei Trust Fund, Hot Bread Kitchen, joint ventures between Provincial holdings with successful business owners; village development with strong leadership and good governance, private indigenous owned businesses with market access and cooperatives,” Mr Prasad said.

He also said some limitations that hinder successful indigenous businesses, which were identified by stakeholders and reported back during the Economic Summit were:- 

• A lack of governance and leadership;
• some iTaukei institutions underperforming their purposes;
• a lack of effective co-ordination and collaboration and
• lack of knowledge and information sharing.

Mr Prasad said Fiji had been brought back to pre-pandemic levels.

“We managed to come out of the pandemic with a strong economic rebound of 20 per cent growth in 2022 and 8.2 per cent growth in 2023,” he said.

“The fact that our economy is now where it was in 2019, means that we have essentially lost five years of economic growth.

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