Economic Summit in April, Fiscal Review Committee to be formed
‘This would be a chance for various sectors to inform the government through a proper consultation process so that they collectively formulate a budget that would be presented a few months later.’
Minister for Finance and Deputy Prime Minister Biman Prasad has outlined plans set by his Ministry in hosting a two-day Economic Summit in March or early April this year.
Mr Prasad said this during the India-Fiji Digital Partnership Symposium at the Holiday Inn in Suva on Thursday night. He said his ministry anticipated a wellplanned two days economic summit with different sectors meeting together.
This he said would be a chance for various sectors to inform the government through a proper consultation process so that they collectively formulate a budget that would be presented a few months later.
“So the 2023/2024 budget is expected to be based on the detailed discussions that we are likely to have at the summit and today I want to invite the IT sector, in fact we will have a whole session on this whole idea of information economy, coming out of that session, recommendations and policies and how we can create a much better enabling environment to build our information economy, our ITEC sector and create an economy that will create more jobs and improve the welfare of our people,” he said.
“On top of that, as I’ve said before and the Honorable Prime Minister has said before, we are a government that believes in consultation, dialogue and that would be the approach that we will adopt in all our processes and all our systems of policy making so that you are all involved in it.”
Fiscal Review Committee
Mr Prasad also talked about plans to appoint a 10 member fiscal review committee to look at the government’s revenue and expenditure.
“That committee will be advising me as the Minister of Finance and indeed the whole of government in terms of what our private sector, our business sector thinks about government policy, our expenditure policies, our tax policies, our revenue policies,” he said.