According to Solomon Star, Finance Minister Rini's speech emphasised that rising oil prices, recovery from the conflict years and the end of logging will be the big challenges ahead.
The last two issues have already been highlighted by the Central Bank governor Rick Hou as key in the coming years:
“Economic growth in 2008 is foretasted to be substantially lower than in 2007. In fact International Monetary Fund has put a forecast of 1.5 percent growth by 2010.
“So you go from our growth of 10 percent now to 1.5 percent in less than five years. We are actually going backwards,”
