Finance Minister Nominee, Ken Ofori Atta has disclosed to Citi Business News government should commence the implementation of the fiscal stability and fiscal responsibility act by the end of this year.
The Act when completed should help the government reduce its borrowing and debt.
He made the revelation in an interview with Citi Business News on the sidelines of an economic meeting with some investors from Morocco in Accra.
“I raised that question because of the macro instability we’ve experienced over this period and just to say that to be able to have macro stability and to be able to be able to hold the currency, we as a government are going to subject ourselves to such an act and this act will then enjoin us to function within certain parameters which will not derail the economy,” he stated.
President Nana Addo in the build up to the 2016 general elections bemoaned the nation’s huge debt portfolio.
He explained that the development has made it difficult for small scale industries to attract funding from commercial banks.
“We will encourage the private sector to take the burden of government and we will reposition small scale industries for local economic growth,” the President said.
The NPP in its 2016 manifesto also asserted that, “Fiscal policy implementation, as it stands now, lacks three basic elements; absence of a transparent institutional arrangement for providing quality fiscal information to the public, absence of a mechanism for ensuring accountability in implementing optimal fiscal policies to guarantee the stability of the system, and the absence of an institution to ensure the credibility of fiscal projections provided by the Government.”
“To address the problem of the current high public debt levels and the country’s high risk of debt distress, an NPP government will adopt and implement rules to anchor fiscal policy implementation,” the manifesto said.
Though the process for the law is to commence with the 2017 budget presentation in March, Finance Minister Nominee, Ken Ofori Atta believes government should be able to stabilize fundamental economic issues by the end of year.
“Well the budget will have to be approved by the first quarter of this year and then subsequent to that we will begin to write those Acts and hopefully by the end of the year we should get those laws in force,” he stressed.
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(Via: CitiFM Online Ghana)