President John Agyekum Kufuor on Tuesday reiterated his call for a national debate on productivity and realistic prices and wages in the country.
He said this would help instil the requisite awareness in the body politic without which economic growth would continue to be stunted and business would not prosper.
President Kufuor was addressing the second national employers conference of the Ghana Employers' Association (GEA) in Accra.
The theme for the conference was "Creating the Environment for Successful Private Sector development in Ghana: The Role of the Social Partners."
The GEA was formed in 1959 to represent and promote employers interests in their dealings with organised labour and government.
President Kufuor said since independence Ghanaians have behaved as though the simple and basic rules of economics did not apply to the country.
"Government and business have pretended to pay workers who in turn, have pretended to work.
'' We have maintained a system of prices and wages within the economy which led to a perpetuation of a false economy and has led to the collapse of many businesses especially the utilities and other basic services."
President Kufuor said the prices of utilities and other basic services bore no relation to the cost of production and therefore took no account of expansion.
He therefore called on the GEA to institute measures to increase productivity, realistic prices, adequate remuneration and contribute to the debate.
President Kufuor called on the business community to modernise their business methods, train and retrain their workforce and tap the rich resources of the Internet for the conduct, expansion and growth of their business.
"There must be effective deployment of labour and skills if we are to stand a chance of competing with the rest of the world in the global market."
President Kufuor said the government was taking steps to restructure its internal debt to ensure that the private sector would not be crowded out of the available credit in the economy.
He said the government, employers and workers must be in harmony to work and share a common vision of the creation of wealth for the benefit of all.
Mr Ato Ampiah, President of the GEA, said the economy did not lend itself fully to facilitate a private sector-led growth because it was characterised by high but reducing inflation.
Others are high but declining interest rates, a high but stabilized exchange rate, low production capacity and productivity.
He said the effect of these factors was the creation of an unstable macro-economic environment that stifled the private sector.
Mr Ampiah said Ghana's internal market was not large enough to support an accelerated growth. Therefore, the private sector should have to compete in the global market if the country is to succeed economically.
"There is no alternative for us than to propel our economy on to the road of aggressive exports."
The GEA President said it was important for Ghana to maintain a flexible exchange rate policy that would allow it to adjust to external shocks.
"The time has come for the private sector to be involved in policy formulation and implementation to influence the quality of human resource that would be useful in industry by participating in existing and new programmes to reflect demands on the labour market".
Mr Ampiah appealed to the government to ensure that the new Labour Bill is passed into law before the end of the year to enable the GEA to educate its members on their obligations as stipulated under the new law.
He said delay in its promulgation would lead to undermining the industrial atmosphere and its urgency was reflected in the fact that while the trade and investment practices have been reformed the labour laws have remained the same for more than 50 years.
