AGI Praises ‘Business Focused’ Budget

THE ASSOCIATION of Ghana Industries (AGI) has praised the 2020 Budget for really focusing on business, indicating that it will enable business owners to plan and predict the future of their businesses.

The Chief Executive Officer of the AGI, Seth Twum-Akwaboah, welcomed the budget and said it did not introduce new taxes or contain policies that could stir up the market for possible instability.

Speaking on Joy News PM Express programme on Thursday, the AGI boss said the budget was carefully crafted by government to maintain the status quo unlike what it did in the mid-year review of the 2018 budget, which introduced more different taxes.

“This time, you could see that the government maintained most of the things that are already in the system,” he said. He pointed to the stability of the microeconomic environment and efforts by government, through the new budget, to keep the indicators at reasonable levels, to buttress his point.

According to him, there is a conscious effort by government to consolidate gains at the microeconomic level, asserting that there exists good stability in the microeconomic environment.

The AGI CEO explained that the currency depreciation had been within a reasonable range with inflation dropping, whilst the policy rate had taken a down turn, arguing that there is no gainsaying that there had been a lot of improvement at the microeconomic level.

The Minister of Finance, Ken Ofori-Atta, stressed how the economy had seen a miraculous turnaround in just 32 months, with growth rate doubling and rebounding strongly from 3.4 per cent in 2016 (the lowest GDP growth rate since 1994) to 7 per cent average under President Akufo-Addo.

By Ernest Kofi Adu