Prof Bokpin: gov’t over-impressed IMF with cuts
The numbers looked good. Better than good, in fact. But one of Ghana’s leading economists is urging the country not to mistake a strong fiscal performance for a fixed economy.
Speaking on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show on Thursday, Professor Godfred Bokpin of the University of Ghana’s Finance and Economics department acknowledged that the government pulled off something genuinely impressive under its IMF programme last year, but attached a significant caveat to that praise.
“Government, we over-impressed the IMF in 2025,” he said.
The breakthrough, according to Prof Bokpin, was not just in the results but in the method. Previous IMF-backed programmes in Ghana had leaned heavily on the revenue side, raising taxes, chasing targets through collections. The current administration flipped that logic entirely.
“What the government did in 2025 was to switch the fiscal calibration from revenue-based to expenditure-based,” he explained, adding that the fiscal adjustments in earlier programmes tended to be “heavy on the side of revenue versus expenditure rationalisation or expenditure cuts.”
The outcome of that spending discipline was a primary balance of 2.6% of GDP, well ahead of the 1.5% target the government had committed to, representing an overperformance of 1.1% of GDP. Prof Bokpin credited this to what he called “renewed leadership in terms of expenditure discipline.”
But that discipline, he was quick to point out, did not come free. Roads not built, projects not started, development deferred, these were the quiet costs running alongside the headline figures. “That will come with huge expenditure cuts, foregone infrastructure spending, foregone development, and bear that in mind,” he cautioned.
The concern deepens when inflation enters the conversation. While Ghana has seen a sharp drop in inflation to around 3.2% to 3.4%, Prof Bokpin argues the structural conditions needed to keep it there simply do not yet exist.
“The structure of our economy currently cannot and will not be able to support low inflation for long at 3.2% or 3.4% or so, because the measures we adopted in bringing inflation down did not alter the structure of the economy,” he said.
In his view, the moment the government loosens its tight grip on spending, which it inevitably must, the gains risk unwinding just as quickly as they were built. “So once you exit, you unwind. When you unwind, you begin to see how the economy itself would also reverse,” he warned, adding plainly: “It will come back to bite you because you cannot sustain that level of gains with that kind of approach.”
The message from Prof Bokpin is not that 2025 was a failure, far from it. It is that outperforming an IMF target and fixing an economy are two different things, and Ghana should not confuse one for the other.
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