Financial Analyst, Sydney Casely-Hayford has dismissed calls for government to present a new a budget to Parliament to address the challenges facing the economy.
According to Mr. Casely-Hayford, the introduction of a new budget would not solve in any essential way the challenges being encountered by the economy.
The Minority in Parliament on Friday called on government to urgently put before MPs, a new national budget to prevent a possible catastrophe due to the current crisis the economy is facing.
Speaking on Citi FM’s news analysis program, The Big Issue, Casely-Hayford suggested that more pragmatic solutions need to be found to solve the issue.
He pointed out that preparing a new budget is not the way to go because the preparation of a budget “gives you an idea of what you want to prescribe in order to fix the problems that are causing deficits in the budget.”
Ghana’s current budget states that government will overrun revenues by GHC 8.6 billion but Mr. Casely-Hayford is of the opinion that since government has given indications it will do its possible best not to overrun at such an amount by close of year, there is the need for the Minority to exercise restraint because the year 2014 has just began.
“You can’t just throw a budget out at this point in the game. Yes; there are certain things that are happening but the budget is not only pinned by the currency depreciation, the budget is pinned by more fundamental things,” he explained.
He mentioned that the critical and fundamental things include, “where government is going to get additional revenue from in other to be able to shore up this deficit that it is producing.”
By: Efua Idan Osam/citifmonline.com/Ghana