PNG growth driver in Pacific

PAPUA New Guinea will continue to be the driver in Pacific region’s economy, but it will continue to experience a slowdown in the non-mining sector, Asian Development Bank (ADB) said. 

While presenting highlights of Asian Development Outlook (ADO) 2014 report on Wednesday, country economist Aaron Batten said the growth outcome for Pacific region would become the fastest in Asia region.

“The driver of that is the very high rate of growth expected in Papua New Guinea’s economy, which is the largest economy in the pacific region.

“It’s expected to drive a 13% growth in the Pacific region in 2015”. 

Figures presented showed the growth was more than double at any of the other regions – driven mostly by Papua New Guinea. 

“PNG economy is expected to grow so quickly because of the commencement of LNG exports later this year, which will drive growth to about 6% in 2014 and to 21% growth next year.”

Batten said  while the total economy would grow very quickly next year, non-mining sector was expected to continue to slow.

He said: “Reasons driving this was because during build-up of LNG construction (2009, 2010, 2011), we saw a large acceleration of growth as the LNG project was constructed and there was a lot of domestic economic activity generated by that.” 

PNG Today / The national