Member of Parliament for the Obuasi West Constituency, Kwaku Kwarteng has said that Ghana is not in a price control regime where the Bank of Ghana (BoG) could impose prices on the people.
He said Ghana operates a free market regime system where everyone knows the level prices in the market.
His statement comes after a former Deputy Governor of the bank, Dr. Mahamadu Bawumia, accused the BoG and the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) for manipulating data on foreign exchange and inflation rates to create the impression that the rates were fixed over the last three months .
According Bawumia “price should normally increase when demand exceeds supply but this is not what we are observing in the BoG forex market…We need reliable data to manage the economy prudently. If the data is wrong, important policy decisions based on such data would be wrong”.
Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show, Kwarteng said “we are not in the price control regime where the BoG says this is how much you should exchange for foreign currencies”[then we all accept it as such].
“Its a free exchange rate regime,” the MP added.
According to him, BoG has a duty to observe various markets and financial institutions and relay their findings to the people.
“For two months now, if you go to the banks you quote these figures around GHc3.8 to the Dollar. If you go to the international exchange rate sources like Bloomberg, yahoofinance, they quote around the same figure [but] somehow the BoG is quoting around 3.1 to the Dollar,” he stated.
Kwarteng agreed with Dr. Bawumia saying that the BoG and GSS have doctored the inflation and exchange rate figures on their websites.
Meanwhile, the President’s economic advisor, Dr. Nii Moi Thompson earlier on responded to Dr. Bawumia’s allegations.
According to Dr. Thompson, “Of course, anybody can come up with their own wishful list of markets, which would then lead to a lot of confusion, hence the need for a commonly agreed metric – the [Consumer price index]CPI…In the case of Dr. Bawumia, he derives an ‘average of only 1.5%’ inflation from GSS figures for 2014, but the CPI available at the GSS’s website does not support that conclusion.”
By: Godwin Allotey Akweiteh/citifmonline.com/Ghana