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Dr Albert Tourna Mama, Ghana’s Resident Representative at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), says Ghana’s macroeconomic outlook is now better than five years ago when she went in for the IMF programme.

He noted that for the first time in a decade, Ghana achieved a primary surplus in 2017 and 2018, while the key macroeconomic indicators were trending positively.

He expressed the belief that some efficient policies rolled out by the Bank of Ghana (BoG) and the Finance Ministry played a pivotal role in the success story.

Dr Tourma Mama, who is a member of the Committee that reviewed Ghana’s IMF programme recently, announced that it would present its final report to the Executive Board of the IMF on Wednesday, March 20, and chart the way forward towards sustaining the country’s economy for accelerated growth.

Dr Tourna Mama made the remarks when contributing to a panel discussion on Ghana’s macroeconomic environment and how it could attract private sector investment at the ongoing Africa Climate Week (ACW) at the Accra International Conference Centre.

The 2019 Africa Climate Week (ACW) is being held under the theme: ”Climate Action in Africa: A Race We Can Win”.

The five-day event, organised by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Government of Ghana and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), brought together diverse actors from the public and private sectors to firm up the action plan to deal with the negative effects of climate change.

For instance, he said, the BoG cut the monetary policy rate by more than 400 basis points, and at the last Monetary Committee Meeting in January, this year, the Bank also cut the monetary rate from 100 per cent to 60 per cent, which were positive achievements.

Those positive outcomes, Dr Mama said, culminated in the high rating given the nation by the Standard and Poor’s, an international rating agency, last year in addition to the high patronage of the Government’s Eurobond issued on the global market last year.

He said one of the key conditions with the IMF programme was to strengthen domestic revenue mobilisation and create space for increase in taxes.

Therefore, the landmark legislation presented to Parliament last week was to rationalise tax exemption and increase investment in certain sectors of the economy as well as increase financial viability of some public institutions.