By Adedapo Adesanya
There are strong indications that Ghana may not meet its 7.1 percent economic growth projections for 2019, as the country’s third quarter result showed that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew at 5.6 percent.
To meeting this year’s target, the West African country will need an accelerated growth of 10.0 percent in the fourth quarter of the year. This is, however, a tough task that is near impossible because key sectors such as construction, financial services, and manufacturing would perform excellently well to be able to meet up, and the indicators of these integral part of Ghana’s economy show their numbers are not favourable.
According to one of Ghana’s top economist and analyst with Data Bank, Courage Martey, “For 2019, I think it is late in the day because we are already in December and any policy implementation right now to achieve that 7.0 percent target for end-2019 will only spillover into the 2020 growth numbers.”
“If you look at critical areas that are struggling to pull up, you look at the construction sub-sector, the growth numbers are not quite impressive after contracting in the first two quarters,” the economist said on Ghana’s Class 91.3 FM.
He added that “they have assumed positive growth but then the construction sector needs to grow strongly and that is where we have contractors getting their payment and we are having liquidity being injected into the economy.”
Hinting on how the government could do this, he encouraged the government to work tirelessly on the Sinohydro project as this will get the construction sector busy and growing.
The project is a deal between Ghana and China for a bauxite-for-development barter agreement which would see the leveraging of a fraction of Ghana’s abundant bauxite by China to undertake a massive overhaul of her infrastructural, industrial and agricultural base.
Meanwhile, provisional data available on the performance of the economy as of the end of September 2019 showed that most of the country’s macroeconomic indicators are on target.