A Professor of Finance at the University of Ghana Business School, Prof Godfred Alufar Bokpin has asked Ghanaians to brace up for more hardship.

He said the economic difficulty currently being experienced will not end anytime soon.

“Looking at the current measures embedded in the 2022 budget and the enhanced measures and the production, both in terms of debt sustainability drive and many other things, it doesn’t look that good and we don’t need to be diplomatic about this,” he said on Saturday, June 18, during Newsfile.

Contributing to the discussion that centered on inflation, Prof Bokpin decried the current state of the economy and stated that it is having an adverse impact on the citizenry.

“We have austerity staring at our faces and fiscal consolidation, either we do it under an IMF programme or the measures we impose on ourselves tell us that the fiscal consolidation we are implementing requires some adjustment costs that will be borne by the citizenry, often times unevenly distributed…and this should tell you that we are not getting out of this anytime soon,” he said.

He stated that the recent hike in fuel prices, rising inflation, and general economic hardship have prevented many workers from putting some monies aside from their earnings.

“If you’re an average worker in Ghana and you look at the proportion of your expenditure on food, rent, transportation, and the rest of them, it’s practically very difficult to save. You can understand why our savings rate in this country is very low while our investment requirement is high.

That gap will then turn to liberalise the environment and make it so conducive to foreign investors to fill the gap in order to realise our economic dream underpinned by the strategy.

When it happens that way, it’s going to be difficult for the average Ghanaian to actually make significant savings in order to take advantage of even the limited economic opportunity available”, Bokpin explained.

He added that another cause of inability of workers to save, is the burden imposed on them by the state through many tax obligations, stressing that these are all contributory factors to the hardship being experienced by citizens.

He, thus, called on the government to inject more commitment in dealing with the situation, despite its earlier interventions.