“A society unwilling or unable to invest in its people and to renew and expand its productive capacity is condemned to economic backwardness”
“We don’t get a “golden age of business” just from declaring it. A golden age for business comes about because we create a dynamic and rapidly growing economy that attracts business”
“My dream is that Ghana in this century will be the nation that leads Africa . An educated, thriving, and prosperous democracy, that we can hold up as an example to the world of what Africa can be, when its people move and work together.”
John Evans Atta Mills
Professor Atta Mills, as is evident in the above statements, has a clear and bold vision for Ghana ’s economic future: a robust and rapidly growing economy which would transform the economy into “middle-income status” in less than two decades. For, in a world dominated by World Bank and IMF inspired macroeconomic stabilization programs, we tend to forget economic progress involves societies being able to produce better and more products to satisfy the immediate needs of the population and for exchange. A dynamic and growing economy is better able to adjust to adverse developments in the global economy, provide employment to the population, and to better wage the war on poverty. This demands a society which invests in its people and constantly strives to make better use of existing capacity and to renew and expand its productive apparatus .
A primordial economic objective in an Atta Mills Presidency will be to significantly increase public savings and to set ambitious targets for public investments especially in productive infrastructure (energy, telecommunication, water, and road, rail, air, maritime transport) which tend to “crowd in” private sector investments into directly productive activities.
Public savings
will be increased through improvements in the efficiency of public resource mobilization (an area in which Prof Atta Mills is eminently qualified to address after his years as the Commissioner of IRS). As Commissioner (and later as Chair of the Economic Management Team, as Vice President) he played a very critical role in raising Ghana’s Tax/GDP ratio from a low rate of 8 percent to over 16 percent by the time the NDC left office in January 2001.
Improved Public Services
More significantly, increase in Public Savings will be sought through dramatic efficiency gains in public service delivery. To Professor Atta Mills, the critical problem of Ghana ’s civil service is not one of size thus the solution cannot be one of “downsizing government”. Rather, the critical issue is to reconstitute a professional, and efficient civil service, able to produce better (and sorely needed) services, to the general public as well as to businesses, in a more cost-effective manner. Professionalization of the civil service will particularly target the economic ministries as well as the foreign services. An important component of this professionalizaion will include better recruitment, compensation, and training policies, the setting strict performance standards, and holding civil servants to those standards.
Accelerated Program of Public Investment
Professor Atta Mills’ focus on an accelerated program of public investments in energy, transport infrastructure, telecommunications, and water resources, has twin objectives. First it is to provide employments, thus a determination to use labor intensive technologies in realizing these investments, wherever feasible and economically efficient. Second, and overriding the first, is the critical need to improve services and significantly reduce the costs of energy, telecommunications, water, and transport as conditions sine qua non for attracting and maintaining private sector investments in the economy. In this connection, Prof. Mills strongly believes that Regional Cooperation in the development of economic infrastructure, especially transport and energy, will be critical to the success of his strategy. This explains the Professor Mills’ strong endorsement of the NEPAD program of regional infrastructure development.
Special Focus on Agriculture
In his vision, agricultural modernization will be critical to the attainment of a dynamic and rapidly growing Ghanaian economy by virtue of its share in employment and in overall output. To this end, the strategy insists on significantly increased public support for agricultural research, extension, and the development of collective agricultural investments such as feeder roads, storage, and marketing facilities. A central pillar of the agricultural modernization program will be the harnessing of water resources for the development of agriculture in order to minimize (if not totally eliminate) the dependence of agriculture on the vagaries of the weather and thus dramatically reduce the risks in the financing of the sector.
Promoting Private Investments
In a global economy private sector investments (national and international) are attracted only to economic spaces where their competitiveness can be enhanced through adequately trained (trainable) labor force, well developed, reliable, and affordable social and economic infrastructure as well as through efficient public services (customs, licensing, and tax administration). Thus Professor Atta Mills’ economic strategy is private investment friendly. There is scope, however, for special efforts to assist domestic entrepreneurs, especially in the agricultural and primary industrial sectors such as textiles and food processing. In conclusion, and in Professor Atta Mills’ words, “A renewed commitment to private enterprise, both domestic and foreign, shall (continue to) determine our national economic agenda, with a re-invigorated effort at creating a level playing field for all actors, and at the same time define a purposeful plan of action to protect our national resources from abuse and depredation.”
