Visiting World Bank Vice President for Africa Makhtar Diop urged here late Tuesday a consistent fiscal policy implementation for Ghana.
This was key to ensuring longer term credibility of the country, explained Nana Akufo-Addo, who addressed the media after meetings with Ghana’s president.
“What I see as the risk, is the risk that has been identified clearly by the government of Ghana that they don’t want to have a reversal of policies. To ensure that there is irreversibility in the fiscal stance that are taken and ensuring that when some measures are taken they are implemented the way that have been decided,” Diop stressed.
Diop welcomed the decision by the Ghanaian government to strengthen the Fiscal Responsibility Law so that it can have more binding measures in case any of the implementing public sector agencies oversteps its mandate and requirements in implementing the budget.
He admitted that the global economic landscape tends to have so many uncertainties, urging that these uncertainties be captured well in order to assure the market generally so that some actions in some parts of Africa and outside Africa do not affect the perception that the market can have of other parts of Africa.
“Unfortunately one of the risks that we are facing in Africa is that when there is one difficulty in one particular African economy, usually the market over-reacts and generalizes that story to the rest of the continent,” the World Bank official observed.
Diop therefore urged: “So it is important that at this particular juncture Ghana continues as I heard from the Vice President, President and the Minister for Finance to put in such programs, stick to it and then go to the market with that determination to implement exactly they have decided to do.”
The visiting World Bank official also pledged that the bank will increase resources for Ghana in its next Aid package for the country.
“We intend in the next three years from the purely public sector side of the World Bank we will extend close to 1.2 billion dollars to Ghana as part of the IDA Aid cycle; and the private sector side of the bank will be extending ,in addition to that, close to 500 million dollars and we have also guaranteed part of the World Bank’s external resources providing guarantees,” he disclosed. Enditem
Source: Xinhua/NewsGhana.com.gh
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