Country's Economic Policies Have Been Incoherent And Contradictory

 

The Coordinator of the Third World Network (TWN) - Africa, Dr. Yao Graham has observed that Ghana's economic policies pursued by successive governments have been incoherent and contradictory.

Referring specifically to informal sector policies, Dr. Graham said since the beginning of economic liberalization some decades ago, the policies and practices pursued by the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) governments have all lacked a comprehensive informal economy strategy.

In Ghana, the informal economy is the biggest employment sector with well over 80% of the labour force, but its contribution to the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been near to the ground, pointing to low productivity.

Instead of a comprehensive incentive policy to drive the entire informal economy, there has been "selective but inadequate incentive policies towards sections of the informal economy," Dr. Graham stated on Friday while delivering a lecture on the topic: "Changing State Attitudes to the Informal Economy in the Context of Economic Liberalization."

The lecture was the fifth in the 2007 Development Seminar series that is being organized by the Institute of Statistical, Economic and Social Research (ISSER) of the University of Ghana in collaboration with Merchant Bank Ghana Limited. The 2007 seminar series is under the theme: "The Informal Economy and Ghana's Future Development: Policy Dilemmas and Prospects."

Dr. Graham stressed that there is basically no real difference in the strategies adopted by the successive governments towards the informal economy except that each of the governments has had a different emphasis in terms of programme direction.

He noted that official perception of the informal economy has always been very strong and evidence of this can be found in official discourse which has constantly talked about the sector, however, the definition of the sector has unfortunately been enterprise-based.

The term 'Informal sector' "does not fully capture the nature, scope and logic of informalization which is pervasive across all sectors of the Ghanaian economy and crosses the boundary between what is traditionally seen as formal and informal," Dr. Graham said.

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