Associate Professor of Economics, Charles Godfred Ackah has said that some citizens have accumulated huge sums of profits during the Covid-19 pandemic and current economic crisis.

According to him, the profits are “supernormal”.

Speaking on JoyNews’ Super Morning Show, the University of Ghana lecturer said the accumulation of such profits intensifies inequality in the economy.

”All over the world, during the covid and after the covid, there’s inequality. Some people and some companies have benefited from the crisis and from the pandemic and have made super-normal profits whereas other businesses have collapsed and other people have lost their job and some people are making losses,” he said.

Prof. Ackah explained that some measures adopted in the 2023 budget to tackle fiscal challenges heckling the economy are not “really acceptable.”

He proffered that the government should have targeted taxing “individuals who have benefited supernormally” from the crisis “and use it to finance debt and to support social protection.”

According to the economist, “any responsible government would be concerned about such drift inequality and will use physical policy to level up.”

He said although the government had raised the rate of personal income tax to about 30 per cent, he wished an additional rate of about 40 per cent would be raised to target the super-rich.

Prof. Ackah also lamented the ineffectiveness of successive governments to generate domestic resources.

“We have not had a government that is developmental enough since the last 68 years or so that are innovative in thinking of how to raise domestic resources and to invest that in critical economic infrastructure,” he added.

After and a prolonged year of inflation hikes and cedi depreciation which some experts have characterized as factors hampering the country’s progress in seeking an IMF bailout, the Finance Minister has just reached a Staff-Level Agreement with the IMF.

In spite of securing a Staff-Level Agreement, Minority in Parliament has warned that the approval of the deal may be jeopardized amidst organizations’ resistance to government’s domestic debt restructuring programme.