“Mr Speaker, let me be quick to add that we are not wavering at all in our resolve to turn this country around. Ours is a history of turning things around when the country is in crisis. When we took over in 2017, we inherited a challenged economy under an IMF programme, which we successfully turned around and exited the programme in two years” Finance minister Ken Ofori Atta has stated.
Presenting the Mid-Year budget review on the floor of Parliament on Monday, the minister stressed ” “If the economy was not on track, we would not have been given the all-clear. That was why by April 2019, satisfied with the stability that we had brought to the economy and the policies that we were implementing to sustain growth, the IMF gave us the all-clear to exit the programme”.
On the issue of inflation, Mr Ken Ofori Atta said that Ghana’s growth rate had moved up from 3.7% in 2016, the lowest since 1992, to an average of 7% from 2017 to 2019.
He added Government had cut the rate of inflation down by 33% over the same period to 7.9% by the end of 2019, and average lending rates had dropped from the 30s to 23.6% and still dropping.
“Our trade balance was up to $2.3 billion. The cedi remained relatively stable. Indeed, the number of our total revenues that we used to service our debt had dropped from the 2018 spike of 73% to 58.9% by December 2019” he noted.
Source: Mybrytnewsroom.com/Kwabena Nyarko Abronoma
