Feed Research Into Policy - Mills

Accra,(Greater Accra) 27 Oct.

The Vice-President, Professor John Atta Mills, said today that academic research must be fed into the policy-making process. He told senior African Policy Researchers attending a seminar in Accra that Africa cannot afford the situation where academic researches lead to results that are only relevant to an ideal world. Prof. Mills said his experiences at the university has shown that simple analysis which can feed directly into policy-making often does not qualify for academic publication. The seminar, organized by the Centre for Economic Policy Analysis (CEPA), and the Nairobi-based African Economic Research Consortium is attended by senior tax, budget, policy-makers and former governors of Central Banks from 15 African countries. He said research should also not concentrate only on the identification of problems without concrete suggestions. Africa has the manpower and resources to effect a positive change in its life, he said, and called for a partnership between researchers and policy-makers to resolve the continent's problems. Prof. Mills urged the researchers to spend time in critical areas of proper accountability of public spending, expenditure sharing between the public and the private sectors and methods of broadening the tax base to ensure fairness and equity. Expenditure management in order to avoid waste and bring the greatest possible returns should be the concern of the seminar. He described policy-making as a difficult task in Africa given the constraints of fiscal pressures, saying virtually all expenditures, including law and order and the building and maintenance of social and economic infrastructure, fall on the government. What is worse is that the tax base does not expand to keep pace with ''these expenditures and governments keep being saddled with deficits which are essentially structural in character. ''The policy-maker is then faced with the problem of managing the expenditures to eliminate the deficit. ''Unfortunately, expenditure cutbacks, (if) not properly managed, can be even more problematic than the deficits themselves.''