Not daunt­ed by the pre­dic­tion of gloom, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Win­ston Dook­er­an says Gov­ern­ment has been able to suc­cess­ful­ly ne­go­ti­ate US$1.3 bil­lion to in­ject in­to the econ­o­my.Ad­mit­ting that growth in the econ­o­my has been chal­leng­ing, Dook­er­an said: "Set­ting the stage for growth has been my ma­jor con­cern and pre-oc­cu­pa­tion dur­ing the last year. To do that, we had to clean the slate and get the fis­cal ac­count in or­der and to deal with the dif­fi­cult is­sues per­tain­ing to fis­cal chal­lenges re­gard­ing CL Fi­nan­cial, con­trac­tors, banks or wage ne­go­ti­a­tions."Dook­er­an said to face the chal­lenges, se­quen­tial plans have been put in place to deal with the con­di­tions for the re­sump­tion of growth.The Min­is­ter said this is re­flect­ed in the Mon­e­tary Poli­cies Re­port of the Cen­tral Bank.

"The re­port in­di­cat­ed there is a resur­gence of bor­row­ing for home con­struc­tion, falling of the ex­cess liq­uid­i­ty sys­tem in this coun­try, and a re­vival of con­fi­dence in the stock mar­ket. This has been fur­ther fu­elled by the ac­cel­er­at­ed Pro­gramme of Pub­lic Sec­tor In­vest­ment."Ac­knowl­edg­ing that there was a de­lay in the fist half of the year in get­ting the pro­gramme off the ground, Dook­er­an said it has since gained mo­men­tum.The Min­is­ter added there has been grow­ing con­fi­dence in the pri­vate sec­tor by virtue of the re­cent mul­ti-mil­lion deal with the In­ter­na­tion­al Fi­nan­cial Cen­tre and the in­jec­tion of new funds in the pri­vate sec­tor de­vel­op­ment. (AG-S)