Uncategorized – Institute for Fiscal Studies Ghana

February 10, 2021

Ghana’s Large Public Sector Compensation Bill- Agitations, Policies, Implications, Causes and Recommendations [Occasional Paper No. 22]

The government of Ghana has long complained about the growth of the public sector compensation bill. It has therefore adopted different policy measures over the years to address this phenomenon. However, these policies have not had a lasting impact on the compensation bill growth. Data therefore reveal that the size of the country’s compensation bill as a ratio of total revenue/expenditure has reached alarming proportions in recent years, despite having seen strong declines in the 1980s. We ﬁnd that the compensation bill is currently posing serious ﬁscal and macroeconomic difﬁculties for the country. Although a few studies have been carried […]

August 23, 2021

The Role of the Extractive Sector in Ghana’s Comparatively Low Public Sector Revenue Mobilization [Occasional Paper No. 24]

The government of Ghana has implemented extensive tax and non-tax policy and administration reforms over the years. Starting from 1983, these reforms have largely been carried out under the auspices of the IMF and the World Bank. However, using a sample of 35 countries in the developing world, we find in this paper that, relative to GDP, Ghana’s total public sector revenue has performed very poorly, compared with those of its peers, confirming findings of other studies. The government of Ghana has often blamed the country’s poor revenue performance on the difficulty in taxing the large informal sector, the generous […]

July 6, 2026

AN ASSESSMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT OF GHANA’S 2025 MID-YEAR FISCAL POLICYREVIEW

When the government presented the 2025 mid-year fiscal policy review on July 24, it had much to celebrate from the macroeconomic perspective. Real GDP growth, inflation, and the cedi exchange rate had seen significant improvements. Ghana’s external account position had also improved considerably. For the most part, information on these macroeconomic developments was well known before the government presented the mid-year review. In contrast, much less was known about the nature of the execution of the 2025 budget during the first half of the year, especially as the budget had introduced many new policy initiatives. Therefore, the Institute for Fiscal […]