Ghana is on track to achieve a single digit inflation by the end of the year, the Vice-President, Mr John Dramani Mahama, has stated. He said the country's current economic indicators were showing a positive response to the global economic bounce back, with the rate of inflation declining continuously since October 2009. It stands at 14.23 per cent currently. The value of the cedi had also stabilised against the major trading currencies, while the balance of payment and the international reserve position had improved and the public sector deficit reduced, he said. Mr Mahama made the observation in Accra Tuesday at the opening of a four-day international conference organised by the Institute of Economic Affairs (lEA) and the USA Centre for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) on public-private dialogue for West African states. The theme for the conference was, "The impact of the Global Financial Crisis on West African States: Leveraging Public-private Dialogue for Development". The Vice-President explained that the reduction in public sector deficit implied that the public sector borrowing requirement (PSBR) had declined, creating space for interest rates to fall and increase private sector borrowing for growth and employment creation. Mr Mahama said the conference was important because it allowed participants to brainstorm and share experiences on the way forward out of the global financial crisis. He said the global financial crisis, which he said began in the latter part of 2007 and intensified in 2008/2009, plunged most of the economies of the advanced world into recession. He pointed out that pressure on the economies of developing countries had come from a number of fronts, among them the fact that African exports had been constrained by weaker external demand, particularly from the US and the European Union, with their tighter financial conditions. The Vice-President said the government, in order to mitigate the effect of the crisis in the poor and restore stability to the economy, had been implementing various measures, including providing school uniforms for children in deprived communities, free exercise books for every pupil in public basic schools and increasing the capitation grant by 50 per cent. Other measures, Mr Mahama said, were rationalising government expenditure by cutting down cost, reviewing mining, oil and forestry concession agreements to curb excessive repatriation, consolidating 27 ministries into 24 in order to rationalise government expenditure, reducing the number of ministers from 87 in the previous administration to 72, as well as reviewing petroleum taxes with the aim of reducing domestic petroleum prices. For his part, a Deputy Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, Mr Seth Terkper, gave background information on the global financial crisis and pointed out that it showed a drop in demand for exports, a decline in remittances and foreign exchange reserves and low budget support from tax revenues, aid and grant. "Overall, growth fell sharply to 1-3 per cent in the advanced, transition and developing world," he said. He said during the period, much of the gains from the decade of exuberance was whittled away quickly within a relatively short period of the crisis, adding that it was a crisis that brought consumers, big firms, governments and whole regions of the globe on their knees. A member of the board of the National Endowment for Democracy, the funding body of the CIPE, Ambassador Lyman, said CIPE was created in 1993 to promote, among other objectives, democracy and good governance. In his welcoming address, the Chairman of the IEA, Dr Charles Mensa, said looking at the importance of the topics to be discussed, participants were drawn not only from the public and private sectors but also top political party officials from West Africa for their inputs. Source: Daily Graphic/Ghana