Review Of Statistical Law In The Offing

The government of Ghana is in the process of reviewing the Ghana Statistical Law to make it mandatory for companies to provide the Ghana Statistical Service with relevant data for the compilation of the National Accounts.

The law would also take into account new methodologies and the use of the Internet which were not captured by the old Statistical Law.

Professor Nsowah-Nuamah, the acting Government Statistician, hinted this at seminar on the “State of the National Accounts in Ghana” in Accra.

He said the service had persuaded companies and institutions to provide data but many of them had not complied.

He said the penalty of ¢500 prescribed by the 1960 Statistical Law was not enough in present-day realities to compel companies to comply with requests from the service to provide information.

He said without information, especially from the private sector, economic aggregates such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), National Income and per capita income economic growth could not be fully computed.

Prof. Nsowah-Nuamah said, for example, that only 20 per cent of questionnaires sent out to sampled non-governmental organisations (NGOs) for the Non-Profit Institutions Satellite Account survey had been received.

Mr Magnus E. Duncan, the Head of National Accounts Section of the Ghana Statistical Service, who presented a paper on the State of the National Accounts, said the computation of the National Accounts had been underestimated for a long period because of lack of adequate data from establishments.

He said, for example, that the construction sector had witnessed a lot of growth over the years but it was extremely difficult to use the expenditure and production matrix because of the highly unreliable information from the sector on income and expenditures.

He said, for example, that the expenditure of the workers in the sector far exceeded their incomes. Mr Duncan also said that when Nigeria and South Africa restructured the compilation of their National Accounts, it was found out that the two countries had underestimated the growth rate by 45 and 40 per cent respectively.

Story by Abdul Aziz