In mid-November, the government tabled the 2024 budget statement within the context of the three-year IMF program that Ghana formally adopted in May 2023, which seeks to address the present fiscal and macroeconomic crises. Since the program’s adoption, macroeconomic conditions have seen some improvement, with year-on-year inflation declining to 35.2% in October 2023 after peaking at 54.1% in December 2022. The volatility of the cedi depreciation against foreign currencies has also eased, while some calm has returned to the financial sector after the government completed its domestic debt restructuring exercise. Nevertheless, the economy is not out of the woods, as […]

Ghana’s recent macroeconomic state has been dire. In the first quarter of 2022, the country suffered a series of international credit-rating downgrades, prompted by sharply deteriorating fiscal outcomes. This shut Ghana out of the international bond market, hitherto a key source of budget and balance-of-payments financing. Following the loss of bond market access, the balance of payments erupted into crisis. From December 2021 to June 2022, the overall balance of payments position worsened from a US$500 million surplus to a US$2.5 billion deficit, thus indicating a deterioration of US$3.0 billion in just six months. This caused the stock of foreign […]