Terkper to present advance budget to parliament

The Minister of Finance, Seth Terkper, is expected to present to parliament on Thursday an advanced budget covering government spending from January to March 2017.

This practice is in accordance with what the Executive does almost every election year to avoid spending setbacks in case of a transition in government.

Announcing this on the floor of Parliament, the Deputy Majority Leader, Alfred Agbesi, said the budget will include “the Expenditure in Advance of Appropriation, January to March, 2017 as well as the Estimates of the Revenues and Expenditure of the Government of Ghana for the 2017 Financial Year”.

The Expenditure in Advance of Appropriation is to allow government to run its machinery during the first 3 months of 2017, in the absence of a full budget statement.

According to legislators, it is also in line with requirements in the constitution, since the full budget would not be offered to Parliament in November because this is an election year.

The new cabinet which will assume office in 2017, after the elections, would also have to approve the budget which it will supervise.

In July this year, government requested a supplementary budget of GH¢1.8 billion to finance expenditure.

The Minister of Finance, went to Parliament to request approval for GH¢1,888,203,387 as supplementary estimates for the 2016 financial year.

He explained at the time that the supplementary budget was necessitated by both domestic and global developments.

Public budgets are the blueprints for how the government will raise and spend the public funds needed for the policies and programmes that will translate its priorities into action.

This year, government wanted parliamentary approval for over 50 billion cedis [GH¢ 50,109,851,734].