Economic Crisis: Gov’t to tighten foreign exchange regime – Dr Bawumia
Government, according to Vice President Dr Mahumudu Bawumia, is looking to tighten its current foreign exchange regime as part of measures to deal with prevailing economic challenges.
Making the disclosure while delivering the keynote address at the 2nd Standard Chartered Digital Banking, Innovation and FinTech Festival 2022 on Wednesday, October 26, Dr Bawumia averred the country’s current foreign exchange regime is loose, hence the need to tighten it.
“We also have to look very closely at our foreign exchange regime which is clear that it is quite loose, we will be working to see how we can try to tighten the foreign exchange regime, because the current regime makes us lose a lot of foreign exchange,” the Vice President stated.
With the tightening of the current foreign exchange regime with policies such as Exchange Controls, government should be able to stabilise the free-fall of the cedi against the dollar.
Exchange controls are government-imposed limitations on the purchase and/or sale of currencies. These controls allow countries to better stabilize their economies by limiting in-flows and out-flows of currency, which can create exchange rate volatility.
Speaking further on the country’s fiscal and debt sustainability challenges at the fintech festival, Dr Bawumia averred the government will deal with the challenges by making bold and fair decisions on the back of an IMF programme.
“In Ghana specifically, we’re dealing with an economic crisis that we have to address in different dimensions. The first and most important, which affects the confidence that we have in economic systems is to make sure that we have fiscal and debt sustainability.
“This has been one of the areas where we are having discussions with the International Monetary Fund, about restoring fiscal and debt sustainability.
“No doubt that this is not going to be easy. It will require very bold, difficult, but fair decisions and I think these are kind of the discussions that we have had with the IMF,” he stated.
The 2nd edition of Standard Chartered Bank’s Digital Banking, Innovation and Fintech Festival 2022 themed “Powering Africa’s Digital Economy: Platforms | Players | Policy”, focuses on Africa’s digital transformation by engaging local and international players who are powering Africa’s digital transformative agenda.
The 2022 Fintech Festival features a series of plenary sessions that will explore the opportunities for co-creation by industry players to embrace digitization and the extent to which platforms and payments are currently creating value and helping industry players to be agile amidst the disruption.
Further more, in a session dedicated to women in technology, participants will discuss the urgent need for women-owned businesses to tap into the enormous opportunities offered by technology adoption and explore investment opportunities to help female owned businesses scale further and faster.
In addition to a great line up of insightful panel sessions, this year, in line with its brand promise to be “Here for good”, Standard Chartered has curated an exciting innovation and lab crawl as well as a Fintech Exhibition with participating Fintechs from Singapore, UK, Africa and Ghana.
