The North's Minister for Finance Peter Robinson has aimed his first budget at boosting investment, competitiveness and increasing the private wealth-creating sector. Despite a drive for much greater efficiency in the public sector which upset some trade unionists, the Minister is also appealing for public support via a massive programme of investment.
His statement combined a series of business-friendly announcements, principally a decision to cap business rates, and incentives designed to encourage nearly 700 businesses to become exporters.
The expenditure programme is focused on what Mr Robinson's department calls the four drivers of economic growth, namely skills, enterprise, innovation and infrastructure. Mr Robinson also promised a series of public investment schemes covering health, education and transport with a crowd-pleasing promise to limit domestic rates levied on homeowners for three years.
The statement promises to fund programmes with more than £750 million (€1 billion) in efficiencies which will be identified across Northern Ireland's massive public sector.
Despite the North having the lowest rate of unemployment in the UK, theMinister has also identified targets relating to educational achievement, particularly the need for more high-end and graduate employment. His targets also include an improvement in the education attainment of school-leavers aged 16 and chiefly a reduction in the statistic of 21 per cent who have no formal qualification.
Mr Robinson also cited the need for more research and development and for the universities to spearhead that drive.
Investment projects include major infrastructural schemes linked to the ageing water and sewerage systems and also to key cross-Border transport links as well as communications links within Northern Ireland.
He said economic prospects were hampered by the inability to exercise fiscal powers especially in relation to business taxation. There were also broad hints that the Varney report into corporation tax and other matters which is due soon will not offer Northern Ireland any dispensation from the UK rate of tax.
Mr Robinson told Assembly members "this would have transformed the region's attractiveness as an investment location".
The budget statement was accompanied by two other core strategy announcements by senior members of the Executive. First Minister the Rev Ian Paisley and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness jointly presented the Executive's legislative programme under the title of the programme for government. Assembly members were also informed of the investment strategy for Northern Ireland.
These programmes, totalling £18 billion (€25.9 billion) over 10 years, commit the Executive over the next four years to working to halve the productivity gap between the North and the British average, with the exception of the southeast of England, and to increase the proportion of those working from 70 to 75 per cent.
Some of the more ambitious plans include a programme to cut child poverty by 50 per cent by 2010 and to eradicate it within the following decade.
Regarding social policy, a range of measures to promote health, social inclusion and wellbeing were announced. Specific policy drives will aim to reduce cancer deaths, while other schemes include a new social welfare allowance to encourage those with disabilities to return to work. Further assistance, estimated at £500 million, is pledged to disadvantaged communities.