Govt Receive Draft Budget From Think Tank (Spread)

THE government’s economic think tank and officials of the Ministry of Finance have presented a draft budget to President J.E.A. Mills and his Cabinet for consideration and approval.
According to an official of the Ministry of Finance, the date for the presentation of the document, which is officially known as The Budget Statement and Economic Policy of the Government of Ghana, would be determined after it had finally come back from Cabinet.
He said the draft budget was expected to reflect the new government’s aspirations.
The budget, which is going to be President Mills’s first since he assumed office on January 7, 2009, is expected to satisfy a wide range of Ghanaians, some of whom had already presented proposals to that effect.
For its part, the Ghana Employers Association (GEA) has said it expects the government to allocate more resources in to tackle national productivity, industrial attachment incentives and improvement of employable skills and energy and consumer protection against illicit trade.
The Executive Secretary of the GEA, Mr Alex Frimpong, told the Daily Graphic that the association was leading a crusade with the tripartite committee to establish production indicators in all sectors of the economy, including mining and construction, manufacturing and services.
He said the Management Development and Productivity Institute (MDPI), a training agency under the Ministry of Manpower Development and Employment, should be well resourced to carry out the exercise, which he said “is critical to national competitiveness”.
Many private sector organisations and companies have performance targets which help them to increase productivity.
Mr Frimpong said employers and academia had been working closely on how to improve employable skills of tertiary students even before they left school.
He said employers also expected some commitments to support that cause to make fresh graduates more skilful to forestall employers’ misgivings over the skills level of the graduates being churned out from tertiary institutions.
A previous budget made the proposal but, in spite of the extensive consultations between employers and the Ministry of Finance, its implementation did not happen.
Some exporters and local importers have taken advantage of the country’s liberal market system to bring in all forms of substandard products that sell cheaper than their local rivals, a phenomenon that some economists believe also has a component of dumping.
Fortunately, President Mills, in his inaugural speech, pledged to protect locally made products from such unbridled influx of substandard goods, a pledge the GEA wants to see implemented or committed to in the forthcoming budget.
Already, the GEA, in collaboration with regulatory bodies and private sector associations such as the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI), the Ghana Standards Board (GSB) and the Food and Drugs Board (FDB), is crusading for policy changes to check the influx.
On energy, the GEA drove home the need for consistent injection of resources to gradually meet the energy needs of the country, adding that the government should not go to sleep over the ephemeral respite the country was enjoying.
For its part, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) expressed the hope that the budget would commit resources to the expansion of the National Youth Employment Programme (NYEP), which it described as an effective vehicle for job creation and “one of the most important initiatives the government has taken in recent times”, reports Emmanuel Bonney.
The TUC said the NYEP was an important national programme that had the potential of creating decent jobs for the youth across the country, as the high rate of unemployment and underemployment among the youth posed a great danger to the social and political stability of the country.
It also described the programme as one of the few large-scale national programmes that were truly owned in terms of policy initiative and financing and repeated its call for an evaluation of the NYEP to provide a guide for a review.
It pointed out that its own evaluation of the programme had revealed that workers employed under the programme were being paid below the national minimum wage, saying that they were receiving their salaries irregularly and in some cases salaries were delayed for more than five months.
The TUC said although the programme was designed to create half a million jobs by the end of 2009, official reports showed that it had created 108,000 jobs by the end of 2007 and that at the time of the evaluation in 2008 the recruitment of new workers under the NYEP had been suspended due to lack of funds.