Infrastructure projects play an enormous role in our economic prosperity – protecting and creating jobs and safeguarding our public services. That is why we are doing all we can and using all the levers at our disposal to maximise investment and support economic growth.

This year our £4 billion overall investment programme will support an estimated 30,000 full time jobs across Scotland.

Transport plays a crucial role in this, and we have carefully targeted our investment in transport projects to make positive difference to our economy and the lives of the people those schemes will serve.

Our transport track record is enviable, with more than £18bn invested in transport infrastructure services quickly, effectively and efficiently, since 2007. Indeed, we view transport as so crucial that we spend more per head on it than England, Wales or Northern Ireland.

More than £8bn has been ploughed into our motorways and trunk roads to maintain, expand and make them safer. Twenty-three road infrastructure projects have delivered nearly 160 lane miles of new motorway and trunk road.

More than £7bn has been invested in rail, with nearly 60 miles of new track opened with new lines for Airdrie-Bathgate and Stirling-Alloa-Kincardine, and of course the new Borders Railway which reopened last year after nearly half a century in the sidings.

We have added 13 new stations to Scotland’s rail network with more new stations in the pipeline, including Robroyston, East Linton, Reston and Kintore.

Since 2007, we have ploughed over £2bn into our buses, £1bn on ferry services for our remote and island communities, £300 million on aviation, £500m on canals, freight and active travel – all to offer more travel options for our people and communities, and better connect goods to the marketplace.

And we are embarking on an ambitious portfolio of new transport infrastructure that will transform Scotland and deliver a transport network fit for the 21st century.

Cutting edge engineering and world-leading design will ensure our flagship project, the new £1.35bn Forth Replacement Crossing, finishes and opens to traffic in just a few months’ time. The benefits to Fife, the Lothians our capital, and indeed the rest of Scotland, are immeasurable.

A £500m package of M8, M73 and M74 improvements in and around Glasgow will see improved journey times and less congestion in the central belt and are on schedule to open to traffic next spring. The new £745m Aberdeen bypass is now well under way which will ease congestion in and around Scotland’s oil and gas capital, and over the next 30 years bring over 14,000 jobs and £6bn to the local economy.

We also want to see all seven of Scotland’s cities interconnected by motorway or dual carriageway, with construction under way on a £3bn programme to dual the A9 between Perth to Inverness, and design work making good progress which will also see the A96 between Inverness and Aberdeen fully dualled.

The construction of new transport infrastructure also, crucially, support jobs. Thousands and thousands of jobs. Jobs that bring prosperity and a national sense of self-worth. Jobs that breed confidence.

But let me be clear our infrastructure investment goes beyond transport. Since the launch of the Non-Profit Distributing Programme in 2010, 37 projects worth £2.4bn have been contracted, with 12 state-of the art facilities across the education and health sectors constructed and now operational. This includes three NPD colleges in Glasgow, Inverness and Kilmarnock delivering modern flexible learning spaces to over 50,000 students.

And over the last year there has been more than £150m invested in the NHS Lothian Royal Hospital for Sick Children and Department for Clinical Neurosciences (RHSC/DCN) and the large acute hospital facilities in Dumfries.

Our ambitious plans include expanding early learning and childcare, enhancing housing supply and delivering 50,000 affordable homes as well as introducing energy efficiency measures to reduce carbon emissions and tackle fuel poverty.

We also recognise the importance of digital infrastructure, and will extend superfast broadband access to 100 per cent of premises across Scotland by 2021.

All of our improvements are ambitious, but, as we look ahead to 2017 and another raft of transformative projects being delivered, a stable platform is being built to enable Scotland’s economy to thrive.

I offer a firm hand on the tiller, and will be doing all I can to ensure our infrastructure investment helps chart a successful course for Scotland’s economy.

Keith Brown is Cabinet Secretary for Economy, Jobs and Fair Work.