Dr. Nicholas Guigas, a Senior Economist and Programme Manager of the Swedish Secretariat for Economic Affairs on Monday advised developing countries to be prudent in the way they accessed non-concessionary loans as it could give them medium and long-term problems.

He said though there were a lot of institutions around the world advertising for non-concessionary loans, the loans were quite expensive and difficult to settle resulting in serious debt traps for those countries.

Dr. Guigas, also a representative of donors for sustainable debt management, was speaking at the opening of the 19th HIPC Capacity Building and the eighth Foreign Private Capital Capacity Building Programme meeting in Accra being hosted here for the second time.

It was organized by the West African Institute for Financial and Economic Management (WAIFEM) and attended by donors from Austria, Canada, Sweden, Ireland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Dr. Guigas said concessionary loans were better to handle compared to non-concessionary ones and asked countries to be cautious and really scrutinize the terms that they come with.

He said Ghana's macro-economy had so far been well managed and urged government to meet international best practices to be fully considered an international player.

Professor George Gyan Baffuor, Deputy Minister of Finance and Economic Planning who opened the meeting on behalf of the Minister said Ghana and other countries still relied heavily on HIPC and Foreign Private Capital Capacity Building Programme (FPC-CBP) in building capacity for macroeconomic and debt management.

He said after Ghana successfully reached HIPC completion point in July 2004, the country had maintained macroeconomic stability and achieved significant improvement in Gross Domestic Product from 3.7 percent in 2000 to 6.2 in 2006, a fall in inflation from 40.5 2000 to 10.6 in August 2007, stability in exchange rate and debt reduction to sustainable levels.

Professor Baffour said government had designed and would pursue policies to provide incentives for private sector growth in the competitive market and urged the donors to continue to fund HIPC-CBP for countries to meet their millennium development goals

Dr. Osi C. Itsede, Director General of WAIFEM expressed his appreciation to government for hosting the meeting and urged it to induce investments needed to boost production and expand output in line with the objectives of becoming a middle-income nation.



Source: GNA