Finance Minister to present midyear budget review today

The Minister of Finance, Ken Ofori Atta is expected to present before Parliament the midyear budget review and economic planning on Monday (July 31, 2017).

Explainer: This is a constitutional mandate where the Finance Minister is expected to give an account of the performance of the economy before the second half of the year begins.

Expectations

Sources have indicated that the Minister will not request additional budgetary allocation from Parliament.

If this happens it will be an unusual practice from what has become the norm where presentations have often come with the request for a supplementary budget.

The decision not to seek additional approval for expenditure from the Legislature also comes at a time when the government may miss its budget targets as its first half performance hasn’t been encouraging.

The minister is expected to review some Marco-Economic targets set out in the 2017 budget to ensure that it ends the year on a good note.

Some economists have indicated that the Finance Minister should use the opportunity to review the government’s revenue target of 34 billion cedis for 2017.

This is because, for the first four months of this year, the government was hoping to mobilise a little over GHC10 billion, but actually made GHC8.7 billion.

This means the State is not halfway through meeting its target.

Others have also asked that Ken Ofori-Atta uses the opportunity to give details on discussions with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on the programme extension.