Report by Ben LARYEA
The government statistician, Professor Samuel Kobina Annim has underscored the need for government to scale up policy capacities to support the country’s growth and development for the governance of the country through research and learning.
He preferred eight indicators that both academics can measure the effectiveness of policies such as policy space, the instruments and targets, outcomes and impact, sequence and hierarchy, calibration, mixes, cost-benefits analysis and data baseline, rate of progress, and end line.
Speaking at a maiden public lecture titled “Conceptualization of National Policies: Issues of Capacity and Practice at the Central University in Accra, Prof. Annim urged the government to embark on an audit exercise from the 1960s and identify policies that have been implemented and access its challenges to draw up a comprehensive framework for corrections.
It was organized by the Central University and in attendance were academicians, management of the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), University of Cape Coast (UCC) technocrats, students general public among others, and chaired by the Vice-Chancellor of the CU, Professor Bill Pupulampu in a PowerPoint presentation.
According to him, the gesture will challenge the government to take stock of revenue mobilization, socio-economic growth patterns, and development as well as productivity in every aspect of the country’s economy.
The government statistician shared his views on the country’s economic development and highlight the lack of a macroeconomic toll box for assessing the performance of the economy, volatilities and suggested weaknesses in policies and the achievement of long terms outcomes, some contradictions in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth and other relevant macroeconomic variables such as inequality tax performance, trends, and patterns in labor statistics and stressed on livelihood transformation and economic growth in transforming the country.
He, therefore, advised players in the economic value chain on the use of one policy intervention in the economy, saying “it has become imperative to redirect productivity in designing fewer data-informed and standalone policies to vigorously policy conceptualization process and an assessment of their outcomes and impact”.
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