The Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has stated that maintaining fiscal discipline is critical to ensuring sustained economic growth.
According to the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP), it has inherited a chaotic economy fraught with huge domestic and external debt.
Delivering the key note address at the maiden National Policy Summit Monday, Dr. Bawumia said topmost of the government’s priority is to provide jobs and create wealth for the citizens of the country.
To achieve this, government has crafted a set of economic policies and programmes as contained in the government’s 2017 budget statement and that the government is very clear that it needs to be transformational.
He said: “Not only in our thinking but in the implementation of the policies that we have thought through. And in that context we know that there are certain critical elements that we have to have in place to make sure this transformation actually takes place.”
“First of all we have to maintain and sustain macro-economic stability,” he added, saying Ghana for years has had a checkered history when it comes to maintaining and sustaining macro-economic stability and fiscal discipline – a situation he said is detrimental to the creation of jobs and wealth.
Pledging that the situation will not be the same under the NPP government, Dr. Bawumia declared that “We want a period where we can see that the fiscal deficit is sustainably low. We want a period where inflation is sustainably low. We want a period where the currency is sustainably stable and interest rates are also sustainably low. These are the elements of macro-economic stability.
“But we cannot get there by wishing for them. We have to get there by working at them. So this whole element of fiscal discipline…is so key,” warning if “we don’t take the issue of fiscal discipline seriously, the whole macro-economic stability that we desire will not take place.
“And so we have to be looking at ways of continuously trying to entrench fiscal discipline to make that…at least we the politicians are kept in check. Because for political exigencies a lot of the time as elections approach fiscal discipline is lost.”