SAO PAULO, (Reuters) – Brazil’s government will turn  its focus to investment and away from stimulus measures,  President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said yesterday, as the  country’s economy makes a robust exit from recession.

Brazil ensured a fairly smooth ride through the worst of  the global crisis for key sectors including automobiles and  domestic appliances with hefty tax cuts but Lula said the state  had to change the way it intervened.

“Now our emphasis is on boosting investment and in this  way, making the wheels of the economy turn in a healthy,  sustainable way,” he said in a televised address.

“When investment grows, production grows, employment and  consumption increase, and the economy needs more investments to  keep turning,” he said.

Lula mentioned a host of previously announced measures to  be implemented to this end, including an 80 billion reais  ($44.9 billion) boost to the coffers of the state development  bank BNDES, and low-cost loans to private banks aimed at making  consumer credit easier to obtain.

Other measures he cited include 15 billion reais in funding  for shipbuilding and fiscal stimulus measures for manufacturers  of computers that would continue until 2014.

“This way, we are going to consolidate a new wave of  healthy investments in our economy and stimulate the productive  sector to keep investing and employing more and more  Brazilians,” said Lula, whose mandate ends in December 2010.

His government created the Accelerated Growth Programme,  the PAC, in 2007 to pour billions of dollars into the country’s  creaking infrastructure, which local industries complain makes  them less efficient and competitive.

Brazil’s conservative economic management, even as the  country boomed this decade, was little noticed until the credit  crisis began ravaging economies around the globe but dealt a  comparatively light blow to the vast Latin American country.

It entered a relatively shallow two-quarter recession and a  consensus is growing among officials and analysts of economic  growth of 5 percent or more next year.

“The same model which beat the (economic) crisis has  enabled, in only seven years, the creation of 12 million formal  jobs, brought 20 million Brazilians into the middle class and  brought 31 million out of abject poverty,” Lula said.

Brazil is a major exporter of agricultural produce and  minerals and is expected to see a steady rise in oil output in  the next decade once recently discovered crude reserves deep  beneath the ocean bed begin to be pumped.