The Cook Islands budget has been tabled with new expenditure close to 1.4 million US dollars earmarked for teachers, nurses, and doctors.
In addition the Finance Minister, Mark Brown, says a significant amount of money has been allocated to infrastructure, particularly harbour upgrades and water programmes.
Under this year's 155 million dollar budget pensioners aged 70 and over will also get an extra 40 dollars a month
As part of an ongoing campaign to combat the high incidence of non-communicable disease, further levies have been put on soft drinks and tobacco.
Mr Brown says increasing teachers' salaries has been long overdue.
"Basically making sure that teachers are being paid their appropriate salary. It hasn't been adjusted for a number of years and we felt this was one area of priority that we needed to address with education being one of the fundamental building blocks for our economy moving forwards."
Mark Brown says Cook Islands gross domestic product is expected to grow by 4.6 percent this year.
