Govt recorded 4.8% deficit in its budgetary operations in 2019 – BoG

The Bank of Ghana (BoG) has revealed that the government’s budgetary operations for 2019 recorded a deficit of 4.8 per cent of GDP, slightly higher than the revised target of 4.7 per cent.

The deficit was financed from both domestic and foreign sources, the Central Bank noted in the 2019 Annual Report.

Total government receipts amounted to GH¢53.0 billion (15.2% of GDP), marginally below the revised target of GH¢54.6 billion (15.6% of GDP).

The major components were tax revenue of GH¢42.4 billion (80.0% of total receipts), non-tax revenue of GH¢7.6 billion (14.3% of total receipts) and grants of GH¢1.0 billion (1.9% of total receipts).

Total government payments for the year amounted to GH¢67.7 billion (19.4% of GDP) which was below the revised budget of GH¢70.2 billion (20.1% of GDP).

Recurrent expenditure was 90.9 per cent of total payments, while capital expenditure constituted 9.1 per cent.

Regarding domestic debt, the BoG said the stock of the debt was GH¢105.4 billion (30.2% of GDP) at end-December 2019, compared to GH¢86.8 billion (28.9% of GDP) at end-December 2018.

The rise in the debt stock for the review period resulted from increases of GH¢5.3 billion, GH¢11.1 billion and GH¢2.2 billion in the short-, medium- and long-term securities, respectively.