Infrastructure has the potential to lift families out of poverty – Minister Rodrigues

Jan 29, 2024 News

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…says Govt. will not be ashamed of such investments

By Davina Bagot

Kaieteur News – The Opposition has accused the government of allocating a massive portion of this year’s Budget towards infrastructure to the benefit of special contractors, while the ordinary citizen is left to grapple with the high cost of living in the country; but the Minister within the Ministry of Housing and Water, Susan Rodrigues has defended the sum to be expended in this area.

In her contribution to the 2024 Budget Debates in the National Assembly on Thursday, the Minister said infrastructure has the potential to lift families out of poverty.

Rodrigues explained that while the House was treated to a number of opinions by the Opposition Members of Parliament (MPs), her intent was to add facts to the debates.
To this end, she pointed to an academic paper written by two leading World Bank Economists. Rodrigues said, “(they) conducted a study in Latin America, over 100 countries and provided an empirical evaluation of the impact of infrastructure development on economic growth and income distribution.”

She added that the empirical strategy involves the estimation of simple equations for Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth and conventional inequality measures, augmented to include infrastructure quantity and quality indicators in addition to standard controls.

Minister Rodrigues drew the attention of Parliamentarians to the findings of that study. “The results are that, Mr. Speaker, 1) growth is positively affected by the stock of infrastructure assets and 2) income inequality declines with higher infrastructure quantity and quality.”

She therefore concluded that the two results combined suggest that infrastructure development can be highly effective to combat poverty and income inequality. Rodrigues asserted that this is what the people at home needs to know, to understand how the development of infrastructure translates to their lives.
In fact, she drew the picture by explaining how investment in infrastructure will transform lives.

“The evidence suggests that infrastructure is essential for a strong economy and has the potential to lift families out of poverty by reducing inequalities.” – Minister Susan Rodrigues

“By providing jobs; many of my colleagues spoke at length about the impact the infrastructure programme will have on our economy by ensuring people have access to safe drinking water, to food, building the farm to market roads, access to shelter, housing, quality health care, schools for education. These are basic human rights Mr. Speaker and we haven’t gotten to other things like affordable electricity, internet connectivity and so on,” she said.

Moreover, the MP begged the Opposition Parliamentarians to inform the government how it should respond to the pleas of residents at community meetings for better roads.
She argued that her colleague ministers often visit communities and the number one complaint is usually the deplorable condition of the roads.
Rodrigues argued, “Must we not respond to the people of Region Three who are punishing everyday spending hours in traffic losing hours of productivity…must we not build the bridge? Must we not build the Wismar/ McKenzie Bridge?”

She continued, “Private capital investment would not come to Region 10 if people have to wait to cross a one lane bridge so all of these investments depend on the implementation of basic infrastructure.”

The Minister made it clear that the government will not be ashamed of its infrastructure development agenda but will demonstrate its ability to improve the quality of life in the long term.
Rodrigues reasoned that infrastructure development was much more than the building of roads and bridges as she informed the House of the existence of a number of peer-reviewed academic papers conducted on the link between investment in infrastructure and economic growth.

She noted, “There are also studies done on bridging the global infrastructure gap and stories on how developed countries have harnessed infrastructure and technology to propel development and reduce poverty. While developing countries have been able to achieve similar levels of development and huge portions of their populations remain impoverished because of a lack of basic infrastructure.”

Consequently, Rodrigues said, “The evidence suggests that infrastructure is essential for a strong economy and has the potential to lift families out of poverty by reducing inequalities.”

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• budget, Infrastructure, poverty, roads, Susan

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