Amid the recent gold boom fueling Ghana’s economy, it is emerging that the impact of gold could be painting an overly flattering picture of the economy, making it harder to tell whether other industries are genuinely growing.
This is an assertion by data and policy analyst Alfred Appiah, who is calling for the country to begin reporting “non-gold GDP” and “non-gold revenue” alongside traditional economic indicators to provide a clearer assessment of the economy’s underlying health.
Alfred Appiah observes that Ghana’s economic reporting has long relied on non-oil GDP to strip out the influence of the petroleum sector and measure the performance of the broader economy.
However, he believes that approach has become less relevant as oil’s contribution to economic growth has steadily diminished over the years.
Instead, Appiah argues that gold has emerged as the country’s dominant economic driver, exerting the greatest influence on exports, government revenue and overall GDP growth.
As a result, strong performance in the gold sector can mask weaknesses in agriculture, manufacturing, services and other productive sectors, creating the impression of a healthier economy than may actually exist.
The proposal comes at a time when Ghana’s gold industry continues to benefit from elevated global prices and rising export earnings, making the precious metal an increasingly significant contributor to economic growth and fiscal revenues.
Alfred Appiah believes adopting non-gold GDP and non-gold revenue indicators would give policymakers, investors and the public a more accurate picture of the resilience and competitiveness of the wider economy, beyond the fortunes of a single commodity.
“We need to start normalizing terms like non-gold GDP and non-gold revenue in our economic discourse, given how dominant gold has become over the past few years,” he remarked, adding that, “The rationale for focusing on non-oil metrics was to assess underlying economic performance without the influence of oil. But oil’s contribution to Ghana’s economy has been declining for some time, making it increasingly less meaningful to strip it out.
He added, “Today, gold is the commodity having the greatest influence on our external sector, fiscal performance, and growth. If the objective is to understand how the rest of the economy is performing, then non-gold metrics may now be more informative than non-oil ones.”
For the analyst, gold has currently become the economy’s biggest growth engine. Measuring performance without its outsized influence could provide a better gauge of whether Ghana’s broader economic transformation is taking hold or whether growth is becoming increasingly dependent on one resource.
