The country is expected to receive before the end of the week the fourth tranche of $360 million from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) under the Extended Credit Facility (ECF) with the Fund.
This follows Ghana’s successful completion and the approval of the IMF Executive Board of the third review of the 36 months $3 billion ECF with the IMF to ensure macroeconomic stability.
The Finance Minister, Dr Mohammed Amin Adam, disclosed this at the Monthly Economic Press Briefing of November 2024 in Accra yesterday.
He said the country had met all the six (6) end-June 2024 quantitative performance criteria and all the four end-June 2024 indicative targets, saying this was the first time Ghana had met all the indicative targets in a review.
He said the country continued to witness strong and continued rebound in economic activity with real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth accelerating to 6.9 per cent in 2024 second quarter and after 4.7 per cent inthe first quarter 2024, driven largely by robust performance in the industrial, agricultural and the Information Communication Technology sectors.
“The first half of 2024 therefore, recorded an average growth rate of 5.8 per cent, the highest in the past five years, and this is a strong signal that GDP growth is gradually returning to pre-pandemic growth levels,” Dr Adam stated. Though the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has not yet released the 2024 third quarter GDP data, data from the Bank of Ghana shows GDP growth was still robust in the third quarter with the Composite Index of Economic Activity recording a growth of 2.8 per cent in third quarter 2024. This is a strong rebound from the contraction of 2.4 per cent observed during the same period in 2023,” Dr Adam stated.
The Finance Minister said the country had outperformed the inflation target set under the ECE programme with inflation declining from the 54.1 per cent in December 2022 to 22.1 per cent in October 2024 influenced by reductions in both food and non-food inflation.
Dr Adam said the approval of the third review by the IMF Executive Board demonstrated the confidence the international community had in the Ghanaian economy and attested tothe firm commitment to the policies, structural reforms, and programme objectives and targets under the ECF.
He averred that the economy had rebounded and growth was strong, returning to the pre-pandemic level growth.
Dr Adam explained that while the nominal size of the Ghanaian economy was $56 billion in 2016, by the end of 2023, the nominal size increased to $76 billion representing an increase of 20 billion in seven years, stressing that “This figure is expected to be more by the end of 2024 when the Ghana Statistical Service puts out the end year data.”
BY KINGSLEY ASARE
