An Economist and Financial Lecturer, Dr. Lord Mensah is advising government to limit its frequency of borrowing.

According to him, that will prevent the economy from getting into trouble in times of uncertainties.

His caution comes despite the International Monetary Fund recently announced it will maintain its lending capacity at one trillion dollars.

The covid-19 pandemic has created challenges for many economies, and Dr. Mensah wants government to be prudent in borrowing to lessen a potential distress that the high debt burden could pose on the other sectors of the economy.

“If IMF which is a fund and countries are contributing to this fund has adapted that conservative posture by maintaining its loans that it can give to it fund members, Ghana should also adapt similar posture. We should also adapt that conservative posture by limiting our borrowing because every country, every institution is trying to make sure that they become conserved as much as they can, try to stay afloat until these covid-19 issues ease before they can think about being aggressive,” he said.

He however urged the government not to bang its hope too much on the agriculture sector to keep the economy moving forward, amid the impact of covid-19.

There had been mixed forecast for the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate of the country for this year, with the World Bank saying the agric sector growth is not enough to drive the country’s economic growth alone. 

This is despite agriculture being the only sector that grew by a little over 8.0% in the third quarter of last year.

Dr. Mensah says though agriculture is doing well, its contribution to the nation’s GDP is small.

“You will see clearly that agric contribution to our GDP is not as large as the services sector and the industry sectors. So effectively, if we are to bang our hope on agriculture, we might be deceiving ourselves,” he said.