MINISTER of Finance Winston Jordan called the Guyana Oil Company’s establishment of a new lube bond and office facility a positive development and another indication of the strides that the Guyana economy is making, particularly in the construction sector, while projecting that growth overall for 2019 will be 4.5 percent.

He was speaking at the commissioning of the facility at Providence, East Bank Demerara, on Friday.

He said that a good measure of the health of the economy is activity in the construction sector, as it means people are seeing the wisdom of building permanent structures.

“Any economist would tell you that a good barometer of how well an economy is doing is the growth in construction… If people are constructing, they are showing faith in the future. They would have made their own assessment and come to the conclusion that it is worthwhile putting down a permanent structure,” the minister said.

The minister said that as a result, at the half year, the construction sector had grown by 8.2 percent, following 8.1 percent growth at the corresponding period last year.

“And, buoyed by this growth, we have projected the sector to grow by 11 percent by the end of the year. Overall, we project the economy to grow by 4.5 percent in real terms, the fifth consecutive year of growth under the coalition government; it would represent another year of solid, broad-based growth, and give credence to the NASDAQ prediction of Guyana having one of the fastest growing economies in the world,” the minister said.