Lets develop home grown policies

Story: Boahene Asamoah
THE Chief Adviser to the President, Mrs Mary Chinery-Hesse, has said that there is the need for the country to develop what she termed “home-grown” development policies that suited the countries peculiar development paradigm.
That, she said, was critical because the country could not always rely on the prescription of its development partners.
At the launch of 2007 “Ghana Economic Review and Outlook” by the Centre for Policy Analysis (CEPA) in Accra yesterday, Mrs Chinery-Hesse advocated for the establishment of national policy think tanks in the country that would fashion out the country’s development agenda.
She said the new role of CEPA should be to focus on policy formulation instead of the current system where it criticises government’s economic policies.
The Chief Presidential Adviser said “it is good to be independent, but it is equally important that CEPA becomes part of the process that drives policy formulation”.
Mrs Chinery-Hesse, who is also a board member of CEPA, said the future of CEPA must be to partner the government, the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) and other agencies and departments to ensure good development policies that would shape the country’s economic and development agenda.
She said CEPA had proven that it had the quality human resources and capability to undertake research, analysis and advocacy that was of international standards.
Mrs Chinery-Hesse recounted the establishment of the CEPA in 1994 by some development partners and which had grown to become a national asset of international repute.
She said there was the need to ensure that CEPA led the way in think tank organisations in the country by becoming a co-ordinating institution and called for greater collaboration of all such institutions to ensure that the country benefited from the ideas and specialisation of such institutions.
A Senior Research Fellow at CEPA, Dr Samuel Ashong, who launched the books, said over the past 10 years, the CEPA flagship had delivered authentic, unbiased and independent annual reviews of the state of the Ghanaian economy while providing concrete recommendations to improve economic management and governance.
He said “sound and critical economic analyses have always underpinned the information in these reports”.
He said the key medium-term challenges included decisive resolution of the energy crisis to enable real economic growth at an average rate of 6.5 per cent per annum, consolidating macro-economic stability and pursuing structural reforms, particularly in the financial sector, to bolster private sector-led growth.
Dr Ashong stated again that maintaining a competitive exchange rate to ensure that micro-level incentives for investments and growth were in consonance with the export-led growth strategy was also a challenge.
The CEPA Flagship, Ghana Economic Review and Outlook, is a 122-page comprehensive technical document tailored to the needs of professionals in the field of economic policy making, analysis and governance.
Five volumes were produced under CEPA’s selected economic issues series to facilitate dissemination of the findings in the flagship. They are Public Finance and Fiscal Operations: The Case for Fiscal Anchor, Monetary and Exchange Rate in the Large, Current State of the Ghanaian Economy, The Energy Crisis and Growth Performance of the Economy, Public Expenditure Management in Ghana: 2001-2006.