Govt committed to pluralistic political system -Veep

Govt is committed to pluralistic political system in the country with a high level of political stability Veep

The Vice President his Excellency Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur has stated that government would continue to encourage a pluralistic political system in the country with a high level of political stability..

He also stated that the electoral system of the country has been taken through a rigorous judicial test and has passed so government intends to focus on the youth unemployment by making the education system respond to the needs of the technologically driven market rather than to the duplication of previous arrangements and the need for the country to diversify from an agrarian and weak industrial economy to one that creates more employment and reduce poverty.

The Vice President made the statement when he addressed a business luncheon Monday at the Movimpic hotel in Accra during The Standard Chartered Africa’s Summit with the theme Making Ghana a preferred investment destination in Africa.

He stressed that Ghana needed political and economic stability to facilitate accelerated economic growth and development and the forum also presents the opportunity to begin an appreciation of governments medium term economic vision m utilize the chance for a frank exchange of instead on how effectiveness of economic choices can be improved from deriving the maximum\n benefit, to the country and the enterprises represented there.

The Vice President said he noted that this year’s participation has given a greater diversity than two years ago and was also happy to also welcome the Chinese and Singaporean delegation in the country as part of the programme.

Vice President Amissah-Arthur however said he expected the forum to access global economic developments and how they impact on the frontiers economies such as ours in Ghana. According to the Mr Amissah Arthur, we have been given some indications of how Ghana ranks with it peers and how we are progressing as a country in the area of oil; producing and how we avoiding the oil curse. There is the constant challenge of not taking the easy path of unsustainable, of resisting an import financed by natural resource revenues. He said we have received reports from the Minister of Finance and the Governor about the evolution of our economy; the challenges in pursuing fiscal sustainability in order to deliver low inflation and exchange stability. This calls for carefully crafted policies with implementation that are properly sequenced. The reality is that there are always legitimate demands for allocation of public resources. In a poor country everything is a priority. The real issue is not the demand for social sector spending to achieve some level of affirmative action. But when the particular spending has achieved the objective and spending needs to cease we then have social forces that, having become used to the subsidy, insist it must be maintained. The question then becomes the level of optimal taxation beyond which additional taxes become a disincentive.

Adding that a key requirement of Ghana’s accelerated economic progress is increased investment in infrastructure and the strengthening of local participation in the economy. Government is committed to promoting a consistent local content agenda as a platform to ensure the emergence of a strong, vibrant and internationally competitive domestic private sector. The development of local content and participation will underpin all our major economic policies and reforms to ensure a better balance in resource allocation Ghana. This he said is necessary for long-term sustainability and social cohesion that The Bank of Ghana continues to license micro finance institutions across the country to improve access to the large unbanked population.In addition, Pension Fund reforms aim at increasing the pool of available capital especially for long-term investment.

The Ghanaian people have been deeply affected by the terrorist attack in Nairobi just over a week ago. This confirms the position the Government took early last year to quickly review our anti-money laundering rules to bring them up to global standards and minimize the weaknesses that could be exploited. Together with our Anti Money Laundering Regulations set up institutions to strengthen the oversight and surveillance capability over the financial sector. The effect of the new regulations has been to better align Ghana’s AML/CFT legal framework with international standards.

and that Energy and infrastructure play an important role to reduce cost of doing business. For this reason, Government continues to focus on energy as an important engine of growth. Energy investments will not only meet Ghana’s demands but could potentially establish Ghana as the foremost energy supplier in the region.

The vice president further stated that the reform of energy tariffs are critical to attraction the interest of private sector investors to the sector.