October 28, 2018

Strong Economic Growth And Significant Reduction In Unemployment: The Critical Issues To Address In Ghana’s 2019 Budget [Occasional Paper 17]

 [Occasional Paper 17] Strong Economic Growth And Significant Reduction In Unemployment: The Critical Issues To Address In Ghana’s 2019 Budget Unemployment has become the most serious challenge currently confronting Ghana. Indeed, the unemployment problem has reached a crisis point, given that the rate consistently increased over the most part of the last three decades, and stood at 11.9% at the end of 2015. The overwhelming majority of the unemployed are young people, aged between 15 and 34 years. Only 10% of graduates find jobs after their national service, and available statistics show that sometimes it takes up to 10 years […]
November 15, 2018

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[Occasional Paper 18] Ensuring Strong Broad-Based Economic Growth and Significant Reduction in Unemployment in Ghana Having witnessed a decline in economic growth in the 1990s on average, Ghana recorded increased rates of economic growth in the 2000s. In 2011 and 2012, the economy of Ghana registered exceptionally high growth rates. Even though this was partly due to the production of oil in commercial quantities, which began in December 2012, the traditional non-oil sector also saw very high growth rates in these years. However, starting from 2013, the growth of both the total and non-oil economies began to decline, reaching incredibly […]
November 19, 2018

The 2018 Fiscal Policy Objectives and Targets: What has changed?

Fiscal Alert 15: The 2018 Fiscal Policy Objectives and Targets: What has changed? Ghana has been facing fiscal difficulties since 2012 and the effects were at the forefront of the fiscal challenges that confronted the NPP government that came into office in 2017. For most of the past six years, large persistent fiscal deficits and a rising debt burden have posed an increasingly serious policy challenge for the country. The implementation of the single spine salary structure for the public sector in 2010, coupled with a sharp rise in energy-subsidy costs and fiscal transfers, rapidly increased public spending. Consequently, the […]
January 9, 2019

Enhancing Revenue Mobilization in Ghana through Tax Compliances

Fiscal Alert 16: Enhancing Revenue Mobilization in Ghana through Tax Compliance. Ghana’s tax/GDP (rebased) ratio currently sits below 13%. Not only is the country’s tax revenue as a share of GDP low in absolute terms, but it is also very low as a share of GDP relative to those of its African peers, pointing to the need to significantly increase tax revenue. Developing mechanisms to improve tax revenue has, however, become challenging on at least two fronts: (i) lack of good data on tax compliance; and (ii) difficulty in finding effective instruments for improving compliance, given the institutional constraints. One […]
May 24, 2019

Ghana’s Attempts at Industrialization: How Can the Country Achieve the Success It Yearns For? [Occasional Paper No. 19]

[Occasional Paper No. 19] Ghana’s Attempts at Industrialization: How Can the Country Achieve the Success It Yearns For? Since independence, Ghana has sought to extensively develop the manufacturing sector of the economy with the goal of becoming an industrialized nation, enjoying rapid and sustained economic growth and development. Yet, data reveal that the manufacturing sector has performed very poorly, leading to the failure of the country’s industrialization attempts despite strong policy attention paid to the sector. Economic fundamentals such as high fiscal deficits, macroeconomic instability, shortage of foreign currency, inadequate raw materials to feed the manufacturing industries, etc. have commonly […]
September 25, 2019

Assessing management of the Ghana Petroleum Fund and Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) Revenue [Occasional Paper No. 21]

Since Ghana became a producer and exporter of oil in the late 2010, there has been strong public interest in the management of petroleum revenues accruing to the government, as it is believed that to make the revenues transformative demands their transparent and effective management. This report assess transparency and efficiency in the management of these revenues and offers recommendations to address observed shortcomings. Read the full report here.