Portugal must ditch PPP investments, focus on exports-minister

* EU/IMF mission to analyse PPPs, public firms' debt

* Minister wants exports to make up 50 pct of GDP in 5 yrs

* TGV links, new airport among projects abandoned already

LISBON, Aug 2 (Reuters) - Portugal's bet on public-private partnerships and public investment as growth drivers led to its current deficit problems and must be replaced by a focus on exports, Economy Minister Alvaro Santos Pereira said on Tuesday.

Santos Pereira said the previous Socialist government had used public-private partnerships (PPPs) -- mainly road and railway concessions -- to mask an increase in public investment and consequent rise in the budget deficit.

Portugal has steadily abandoned a number of high-profile schemes as its debt crisis, including high-speed train lines to Madrid and other major cities and a new international airport for Lisbon.

"PPPs became an economic policy instrument to base all our growth on the illusion that public investment would lead us to a new era of growth and prosperity," the minister told a parliamentary committee.

"What that era led us to was the current situation in which we were forced to request external help, partly because of that unrestrained policy," he added.

The terms of the 78-billion euro bailout Portugal agreed with the EU and the IMF in May require the new centre-right government, which took over in June, to review major PPPs to identify, and possibly renegotiate, potential unforeseen costs for the state.

Officials from the EU and the IMF are currently in Lisbon to conduct a first review of its bailout deal and are expected to ask questions about the review of the PPPs.

Analysts say, however, that any revision of the public sector's obligations in the contracts would likely be done with the lenders' blessing and seen as a new starting point, without penalising the government's record in meeting fiscal targets.

Santos Pereira said the new government's model for growth is anchored on exports growth rather than large public works.

"Portugal exports too little for its size. We export around 35 percent of our GDP. In the medium term, in around five years, we should be exporting around half of our GDP," he said.

The minister added that large, costly projects such as the high-speed TGV passenger rail link between Lisbon and Madrid had to be cancelled in order to make room for building railway lines that help take Portuguese goods to export destinations. (Reporting by Shrikesh Laxmidas and Filipa Lima; editing by Patrick Graham)