Itongadol.- Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Wednesday called for 4-5% economic growth over the course of the next decade, saying that growth was the only way to fund Israel’s security challenges.
“We need to continue growing at 4-5% , at a higher level of per capita income,” he said in a message to the Israel Democracy Institute’s Eli Hurvitz Conference on Economy and Society in Eilat.
“The only way to fund our security needs…is through economic growth. Not through excessive taxation, not through getting the money from someone else,” he added. Fiscal responsibility was paramount, Netanyahu said, and growing the economy at 4-5% would be necessary to keep Israeli tax rates low.
Although Israel’s GDP growth reached levels peaking around 6% over the past decade, in more recent years it has hovered in the 3-4% range, still among the highest in the Western world."
Netanyahu laid out three areas that he said could boost Israel to higher growth. The first was investing in cyber-security, an area that will necessarily dovetail on the growth of the Internet, and in which Israel had a competitive edge. The second was building transportation infrastructure, which could actually leverage the high real estate prices in the country’s center to push growth outwards. The last was growing new markets for Israeli exports, particularly in China.
Competition in all fields – whether government, business or the capital markets – was important for innovation and growth, he continued.