Professor Godfred Alufar Bokpin, an economist, has called for far-reaching structural reforms in Ghana’s public finances and productive sectors to break the country’s recurring dependence on International Monetary Fund (IMF) programmes.
He said repeated economic crises reflected deeper weaknesses in fiscal management, public investment, institutions and policy implementation that could not be addressed through fiscal consolidation alone.
“Ghana has had to move beyond traditional measures such as expenditure controls and revenue enhancement and resort to debt restructuring because recurring economic disruptions have imposed enormous costs on the economy,” he said.
Prof. Bokpin, a lecturer at the University of Ghana Business School, made the remarks at a public lecture in Accra as part of activities marking the 2026 Civil Service Week.
He said Ghana’s long history of IMF programmes demonstrated that macroeconomic stability, although important, was not sufficient to deliver sustainable economic transformation.
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“Macroeconomic stability is not the same as economic transformation,” he said, stressing that Ghana had spent decades pursuing stability without achieving the structural transformation required to create sustainable prosperity.
Prof. Bokpin said the country’s repeated engagement with the IMF and World Bank had also increased external influence over aspects of Ghana’s economic policy design, implementation and monitoring.
He noted that Ghana had recently completed its 17th IMF programme but cautioned against assuming that it would be the last.
“I am more comfortable this morning using the word ‘when’,” he said, referring to the possibility of Ghana returning to the Fund.
Prof. Bokpin said Ghana needed to build a more resilient economic model, change its approach to economic management and consistently implement long-term policies to break the cycle of recurring IMF programmes.
He identified policy inconsistency and weak public-sector institutions as major constraints on economic performance and investor confidence.
The economist said predictable economic policies were essential to encourage investment and enable indigenous businesses to build the capacity to compete in international markets.
He said Ghana’s economic challenge was not necessarily a lack of resources but how those resources were deployed.
Prof. Bokpin noted that borrowing could support economic development when borrowed funds were invested in projects capable of generating sufficient returns to service the resulting debt.
He, however, questioned the economic value of projects that took several years to complete, particularly when substantial cost increases occurred before the projects began generating economic benefits.
Prof. Bokpin cited road projects that had taken more than a decade to complete and whose final costs had risen several times above their original budgets as examples of inefficiencies in public investment.
He also attributed Ghana’s weak domestic revenue mobilisation partly to the limited expansion of the formal, productive and taxable sectors of the economy.
A significant proportion of economic activity, he said, remained outside the formal tax net, limiting the Government’s ability to generate adequate domestic revenue.
Prof. Bokpin cautioned that increasing tax rates alone would not resolve the revenue challenge and urged the Government to create conditions that encouraged more businesses and workers to formalise and generate taxable income.
He called for greater support for indigenous businesses and stronger coordination between fiscal and monetary policies and the real economy.
Such measures, he said, would strengthen domestic productive capacity, broaden the tax base and make the economy more resilient to future economic shocks.
