Public debt stock hits GHC145bn ending February 2018

The country’s debt stock has reached ¢145 billion ending February 2018, the latest Summary of Economic and Financial Data released by the Central Bank of Ghana has shown.

This was released after the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of Ghana (BoG) met this week to review the health of the economy.

However, when this debt is expressed as a percentage of the value of the economy which is said to be a little over ¢200 billion, then it’s now 60 percent, or let’s say the debt –to-GDP stands at 60 percent.

This represents about 9.8 percent reduction from the country’s position of 69.8% at the end of December 2017.

The development can be attributed to what some are describing as “expansion” of the economy over the past months or the strong growth recorded.

Details of the debt stock

The report showed that from December 2017 to the end of February the debt stock in “nominal terms” went up by ¢2.5 billion from January to February 2018.

It’s not clear for now might have caused the increase, whether it was as a result of fresh borrowings or the cedi’s marginal depreciation might have caused this increase.

According to the data, External debt ending February 2018 stood at ¢17.4 billion, in dollar terms and ¢76.9 billion when you covert it into the local currency.

This showed that, it has gone up marginally compared to the ¢75.8 billion in December 2017. In terms of Debt-to-GDP for the External debt, it stood at 31.8 percent.

Domestic debt stood at ¢68.2 billion, representing a Debt-to-GDP ratio of 28.2 percent. Now the increment of the debt stock in dollar terms was about 1.1 billion dollars and ¢1.5 billion for the domestic debt.

Source: myjoyonline