Al-Kazemi's advisor puts forward a proposal to double growth rates

 
05/07/2022

Economy News - Baghdad

The financial advisor to the Prime Minister, Mazhar Muhammad Salih, proposed, on Saturday, to raise the volume of investment in 6 sectors to double growth rates, and while detailing employment rates in 3 vital sectors, he identified the reasons for their decline.

Saleh said, to the official news agency, that "Iraq has put at the forefront of its priorities seeking to enter the prospects of rapid development and development to transcend the stage of the rentier economy or the mono-economy, as crude oil still constitutes the largest weight in the components of the gross domestic product."

He added, "The crude oil extractive industry sector still accounts for more than half of the contribution to the country's GDP, as oil revenues remain the major lever to finance investment and development in the sectors targeted by the country's development plans."

Saleh pointed out that "the national workforce is distributed sectorally, and strangely, as the workforce in the crude oil sector, which is the largest contributor to the formation of the country's gross domestic product, does not exceed 2% of the total Iraqi labor force, and the agricultural sector's share of the gross domestic product It does not exceed 5% at best and includes about 21% of the labor force, as well as the manufacturing industry, which accounts for 1% of the gross domestic product and includes in its ranks about 18% of the labor force.

He continued, "This means that there are clear structural imbalances and low productivity polarizations in the agricultural and industrial transformational sectors in the interest of human concentration working in the service sector with low productivity and coexisting on the outputs of the rentier sector returns in the economy."

Saleh explained that "the five-year and ten-year economic and social development plans are the ones that determine the sectoral and overall growth rates in order to bring about a fundamental change in the contribution of the vital productive sectors other than the crude oil sector to the gross domestic product, which is what is called diversifying the production structure of the overall economy."

The Prime Minister’s advisor, proposing solutions, pointed to the “importance of changing production patterns and their components in employing labor and investing in national capital for the benefit of the real vital sectors, starting from maximizing the role of the agricultural sector in the gross domestic product and ending with the manufacturing industry and digital services, without forgetting that there is a major restriction on That diversification is represented by the consistent initiation of investment in physical and institutional infrastructure.”

He stressed that "the growth in the various sectors increases by a double rate whenever the rates of investment in the infrastructure of the economy increase, especially the six sectors: electricity, water, transport, communications, education and health. Thus, nations progress on the basis that development management is joint between state programs and private sector programs in an integrated manner."

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