A Member of Parliament’s Finance Committee, Dr. Stephen Amoah, says Ghana has always had an extremely volatile fiscal space and has had problems consolidating it.

He said this in support of his assertion that even without the Covid-19 pandemic, Ghana has always run a negative effective tax rate system.

“And what it means is that whether with or without Covid, monies outlaid to the households if you divide all of them by the houses, each of them that get from the government, and the money that government gets as revenue excluding loans, if you divide them among the houses its negative. What goes there is bigger than what we get,” he explained on JoyNews’ PM Express.

According to him, all of Ghana’s fiscal problems could potentially be solved if the government finally finds a solution to the “ritual deficit economy that all the time we’re getting”.

He was speaking concerning the 2022 Mid-Year Budget Review delivered on the floor of Parliament by the Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, July 25, and matters arising.

Minority Member of Parliament, George Kweku Ricketts-Hagan who was on the show had earlier stated that the Mid-Year Budget Review had not sent a strong signal to Ghanaians, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the international financial community of the government’s readiness to adapt to measures to put the country back on track and restore economic and financial stability.

He had gone ahead to express his disappointment in the government’s failure to tackle the country’s balance of payment issue.

Responding to the Minority MP’s concerns, Dr. Amoah explained that the Mid-Year Review is not to solve all of the problems in Ghana’s fiscal space but rather to mitigate the current harsh economic situation in the country occasioned by the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian-Ukraine war while the country waits for support from the IMF.

“The Mid-Year Review, if anybody tells you it is a review, a presentation or submission that is going to solve these problems, it is not true. What it’s going to do, what is being done is that the severity of the situation we’re having as a result of the disturbed global value chain which is giving us this hardship and deteriorating our fiscal space and all these exchange rates, we’re putting ourselves in a situation where we can work on mitigating its impact and move this country forward,” he said.