Govt urged to sustain effort to attract investors
A former head of the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre (GIPC), Mr Kwasi Abeasi, has stressed the need for Ghana to sustain its efforts at attracting investment into the country.
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Speaking at the GRAPHIC BUSINESS/Fidelity Bank breakfast meeting in Accra, he said “Investors will not come into the country when they visit once or when we also go there once. Attracting investors requires a consistent effort and putting the necessary things in place. Attitudinal change, among other incentives, is needed and that is one of the things we need to be working at as a country,” he said.
Mr Abeasi also noted that in the country’s quest to export more, there was the need to critically consider a few issues that were often ignored.
For instance, he said it was not only the volume of exports which was crucial but even more importantly the quality and value of the exports, and urged exporters to take that aspect more seriously to meet international standards.
“Our two types of exports have to be handled differently because NTEs processing is easier and less capital intensive but processing traditional exports such as gold, timber and recently oil requires high levels of technology and approval by the external market and requires huge political will of the government to try and overcome internal obstacles,” he said.
According to him, several policy initiatives had been developed and implemented over the years in an attempt to increase the volume of both traditional and NTEs with various levels of success, but Ghana had not been able to meet the optimum levels that it desired.
“Trade policy reforms to render our country more competitive have no doubt been enormous in regenerating our economy but they need to be complemented by other measures to give us maximum effect,” he said.
Export Incentives
The Minister of Trade and Industry, Mr Haruna Iddrisu, said the government remained committed to improving the ease of doing business and where possible, also reduce the cost of doing business in the country.
Therefore, the 2014 budget statement provided export incentives. “There is an ongoing work at the port and custom daily as part of measures to decongest the ports and other related issues.
The 2014 budget statement stated that new export incentives would be introduced in the ensuing year in order to recognise and thereby boost the efforts of exporters of non-traditional products.
It said primary among these would be the introduction of Export Bonus facility which would be a non-cash redeemable voucher directly related to the proportion of export revenues earned by the exporters.
Also, an Export Leaders Award scheme would be operationalised to reward entrepreneurs with outstanding export oriented innovations. This programme would be decentralised in order to encourage the district level export orientation.
Again, the waiver of taxes on raw materials for export oriented manufacturing would be introduced as an additional incentive for export production. GB