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Mon, 19 Oct 2015 Feature Article

How Is Economic Policy Constructed In Ghana

How Is Economic Policy Constructed In Ghana
19 OCT 2015 LISTEN

Ghana suffering from inconsistence of communicated information on the state of macroeconomic affairs known to emanate from the president, some of it ministers and even government communication team; has a critical challenge for Investors support to the private sector.

The impression created now to the external community is that; Ghana is a high risk investment zone area because the economic managers could not confirm their policy directions with confidence. This support the logic fact that, he who controls the economic affairs is pretty not confidence in his words and trustworthy to his communication pattern, then you; who just run your business at the mercy of the microeconomic indices.

It brings us to the term policy, which seems not to be properly defined in the political dictionary of Ghana. Policy is a deliberate system of principles to guide decisions and achieve rational outcomes or statement of intent and implemented as a procedure (Wikipedia, 2014).

Having a clear understanding of what the word policy purport, gives underlining implication of whether Ghana present situation could be defined as having no policy or bad policy direction.

This paper has become relevant, because of the effect of external brand damage on micro-investment support to private sector from the foreign market, as the introduction content of this paper seek to portray. This direction of argument never deduces that government, as human institution could not err.

The import of this deduction is to question the rationality and logic behind some mistakes of government, if it is really guided by policy but not opinions subjected to trial and error. Per the definition above, if policy is to be a principle document, to achieve a rational outcome, then we should expect government communication and actions to be concurrent, with a strong theoretical base behind every promise delivered to the citizen as a prove of a country that has serious scholars that are in control of the helm of affairs.

Such will release government from unnecessary tension emanating from the people to quickly judge its economic management skills but will rather focus on parameters concorted by every policy document, resulting to failure per fallibility of human if there is any.

My further findings indicate that for the past decade, proportional number of civil servant under government of Ghana scholarship and foreign sponsorship to study Policy and Public Administration in developed countries is above 50 but was unable to statistical present any meaningful information since data in such subject matter was not easily to be obtained. The fact still remains that the level of education in Ghana as at now, has move to an unprecedented level since the inception of the Independence of the republic state of Ghana, yet if the purpose of education, was to be an answer to society problem, then; our economic development growth should have correlated but unfortunately it is rather inversely proportional as at now.

And critical question raised is, do this graduate with all this investment; return to the country- Ghana, ill-prepared to the domestic challenges or political denied to carry-out their true duties to the society that invested in their education? Such hypothetical deduction is still in the social-economic lab for further findings.

However the major focus of this paper was to find-out how Government of Ghana, come-out with policy to address macroeconomic challenges; such was very difficult to derive any meaningful pattern establish in the scholastic library of government that support policy construction methodology, which logically conclude if even, there has been policy designed by government, it has been at the mercy of opinion concortion to arrive at a drafted manual deem fit by government.

Such revealing findings also deduce the correlation of bad or no policy and increase in committee and board appointment by government at the expense of tax payers’ money. Finding concluded that if government strives for quality policy, it could cut down cost for committee appointment leading to high reserve in government expenditure for relevant investment.

This then brought my attention on present abstract of the President comment on the media landscape of Ghana which I quote “As a president I need yet another mandate to complete the policies initiated by his government in addressing the plight of Ghanaians”. The question that immediately surface in my mind is what is policy? And is Ghanaians aware of any policy that will address their plight. If there is, then it lacks proper communication for easy grassroots understanding which is a simple logic to class based teaching, after you finish teaching and majority of your student never understood the lesson, teaching never took place.

There is soo much evidential scenarios in Ghana whereby the President is presumed to make promises of personal opinions through media pressures ending up to be a fiasco because it not guided by policy construct. Could our legislature educate the public procedural action, it goes through to legislate designed policy presented to the house. When all such information are held in secrecy, it create lack of public confidence, which give room for rumors and allegations against the august house, wining support from the masses, due to the existing lack of confidence. So I pray that this paper should add-up to the library of governance on the correction of information asymmetry syndrome of Ghana.

This should not be seen as too late to be corrected or the projector of this piece not on the same political side of ideology, therefore it input need to be ignored, because the IMF we trust soo much today and some years ago, on macroeconomic policy direction came out blatantly in Feb. 12,2012. When they realized they err from the economic research department led by Olivier Blanchard &Co. With the publication titled “Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy” by outlining what they thought they knew but time proved them wrong.

Conclusively this paper seek to request government to strive to produce quality policy which will be strictly adhered to and well communicated to it citizens, to reduce pressure group on government but on the merit of the document at hand agreed in consensus by the people.

Further to avoid vacuum promises which put doubt in the mind of micro investors, who could also help the private sector of Ghana in a different medium for positive macroeconomic environment and help to cure the present perception of competency and credibility status of economic expert in the market of Ghana which is becoming questionable in the international market due to some of this unpardonable mistakes

The paper further asserts that, we the people request to be educated on how Policy is constructed in Ghana to the benefit of all of us.

Understand it implementation and investment patterns to know technocrat under the cover of government with gross incompetence to make government unpopular.

These are humble petition filed for government attention and wisdom response.

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