Yaw Osafo-Marfo, Minister of Finance and Economic Planning on Monday asked the Briton Woods Institutions to critically review recommendations of the HIPC initiative to reflect the country's vulnerability to the uncertainties of the external environment.
"This has become a critical issue since over-optimistic economic projections and the risk posed by the 'external shocks' such as commodity price falls affect the long term debt sustainability," he said.
Osafo-Maafo said this when he opened a two-day joint Commonwealth Secretariat/World Bank workshop in Accra on long-term debt sustainability in the context of achieving the Millennium Goals (MDGs).
The workshop seeks to provide a broad framework effort by the International Community to revisit the HIPC (Highly Indebted Poor Countries) initiative with a view to assessing its effectiveness in addressing the need to attain long-term debt sustainability.
Osafo-Marfo said with the current growth rates of Africa, many countries could not meet the MDGs by 2015 and called for the immediate expansion of the role of the private sector, which is the main agent of wealth creation.
He said the problem faced by the poor countries called for increased flow of resources to immediately compensate for external shocks.
This, Osafo-Marfo said, explained HIPC's support to the new global financing initiative proposal made by Gordon Brown, the United Kingdom Chancellor, who had advocated a new Model Marshal Plan to raise development aid from the current 50 billion dollars a year to 100 billion dollars to 2015.
"This will allow the front loading of aid flows to support countries' poverty reduction strategies in order to achieve the MDGs," he said. The Minister noted that the recent economic slowdown, coupled with the significant declines in many primary commodity prices had weakened growth and export performance of HIPC in the last two years.
"Virtually all HIPC and developing countries are heavily dependent on primary commodities for their export earnings and government revenue, and as a result would remain vulnerable to adverse exogenous developments," he said.
Osafo-Marfo said indications were that the debt of some countries that had reached the HIPC completion point might also remain unsustainable due to the unlikely-hood of some creditors to provide relief as anticipated.
Besides, he said current statistics had indicated that 20 countries were in their interim period gearing up to face similar challenges. He said it was the hope that Ghana would reach its completion point by June 2004 where the large chunk of its debt would be written off.
