“We can always have a discussion on whether we have the right balance, but it is the core value in Denmark and our democracy is built on the old school reforms \u2013 they are more than 100 years old \u2013 where it was an obligation for people to go to school and it was supported by the state. Funding came from a very high tech level. We tax persons more than 50 percent on average, we have all kinds of taxes which are of course needed when you want to have a big public sector.”<\/p>\n
He stated that the importance of education to the development\u00a0of the\u00a0country had been firmly established in the\u00a0Scandinavian nation<\/p>\n
As a result, despite his own preference for the taxes to be lowered, the citizens are more than happy to pay the high taxes to ensure that their wards have access to quality educational services.<\/p>\n
“Our main focus is on education. We need to educate our population so that they are able to reach out for new opportunities. I have a son who\u2019s 26 years old, and is now working with Microsoft in Copenhagen, but I don\u2019t understand what he\u2019s working on. The next generation will see new opportunities that we cannot even imagine today. What we can do is to educate them so that they can have a chance to reach out for new opportunities,” he said.<\/p>\n
“You could find another balance as a liberal, I would like to see it lowered a little bit so we could have a bigger private sector, but that is more of an ideological debate.”<\/p>\n ‘Great potential’<\/strong><\/p>\n Anders Samuelsen praised Ghana’s democratic credentials which he said had earned it respect around the globe, and had positioned the West African country as a great destination for potential investors.<\/p>\n “Ghana is a great example of the potential we see in Africa. [Ghana] is one of the examples people look up to and that\u2019s one of the reasons why our Queen is looking forward to this visit. You have a good story and a good track record and we have the same focus in trying to develop human rights, democracy and respect for law and order, and at the same time, we have a common view on trade as being one of the most important ways to get people out of poverty to middle-class standard and thereby being able to live the life they dream of,” he said.<\/p>\n Ghana’s Free SHS education<\/strong><\/p>\n In Ghana,\u00a0very few people in the formal sector pay taxes\u00a0while the majority of the population in the informal sector are not captured in the tax net.<\/p>\n In spite of this, and the fact that the country largely depends on donor funding to support its budget, the government has implemented a policy to offer free Senior High School education.<\/p>\n The initial stages of the policy, which is to cost the government some Ghc400 million for the first academic year, has been fraught with infrastructural challenges in many schools.<\/p>\n Government has so far not disbursed all the monies needed by the schools to cater for the first year students who are the beginners for the policy’s implementation.<\/p>\n There have been concerns about how the country intends to fund the programme, sustain it and also maintain quality education, considering that the economy largely thrives on importation and services with very little focus on industrialization.<\/p>\n Danish queen\u2019s visit<\/strong><\/p>\n Citi FM\u2019s<\/strong>\u00a0reports from Denmark come ahead of the official State Visit of Denmark\u2019s Head of State, Her Majesty the Queen Margrethe II, from November 23 to November 24.<\/p>\n The\u00a03-day press trip to Denmark was organised for four selected Ghanaian journalists, including\u00a0Citi Breakfast Show<\/strong>\u00a0host, Bernard Koku Avle.<\/p>\n The press trip will be capped with a press conference with Queen Margrethe II.<\/p>\n The Queen, on her eventual historic visit\u00a0to Ghana, is expected to be accompanied by a Danish business delegation within three focus sectors, namely food & agriculture, sustainability, maritime, infrastructure and railways.<\/p>\n –<\/p>\n By: Edwin Kwakofi\/citifmonline.com\/Ghana<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Foreign Affairs Minister of Denmark, Anders Samuelsen, has attributed the Scandinavian nation’s ability to ensure free education all the way to the tertiary level to the\u00a0willingness of the citizens to pay high taxes. According to him, the education of the youth is a “core value” of Danish culture, with the state willing to support […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,11],"tags":[1896,258,41,1931,253,3,1932],"yoast_head":"\n![\"anders\"](\"http:\/\/citifmonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Anders.jpg\")