Ghana implements data system for enhanced economic monitoring
Adesola Afolabi was a businessamlive reporter and Head of Financial desk.
An enhanced general data dissemination system that will enable the publication of essential macroeconomic data in Ghana has been implemented.
The system, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was implemented on the IMF’s recommendation in a bid to provide national policy makers and domestic and international stakeholders, including investors and rating agencies, with easy access to information critical for monitoring economic conditions and policies, the IMF said in a statement on Tuesday.
The country’s economic information will thus be made available through an Enhanced General Data Dissemination System (e-GDDS) facilitated by publishing critical data through a National Summary Data Page (NSDP), the IMF explained.
According to the IMF, the e-GDDS was established in 2015 to support improved data transparency, encourage statistical development, and help create synergies between data dissemination and surveillance.
On the other hand, the IMF explained that, NSDP is a national “data portal” that serves as a one-stop publication vehicle for essential macroeconomic data on the national accounts, government operations and debt, monetary and financial sector, and balance of payments, among others, in both human and machine-readable formats.”
It added that it will make information easily accessible in both human and machine-readable formats and will allow users to have simultaneous access to timely data and bring greater data transparency.
Louis Marc Ducharme, chief statistician and data officer, and director of the IMF’s statistics department, welcomed this major milestone in the country’s statistical development. “I am confident that the Republic of Ghana will benefit from using the e-GDDS as a framework for further development of its statistical system,”he said.
The IMF pointed out that Ghana has benefitted from a project on the improvement of data dissemination in Africa financed by the United Kingdom’s department for international development.
It said the NSDP is hosted by Ghana’s ministry of finance and economic planning, utilizing the statistical data and metadata exchange.
The IMF also made available a link to Ghana’s NSDP on it’s dissemination standards bulletin board.
“The NSDP contains links to statistics published by the Bank of Ghana, the Ghana Statistical Service, and the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning,” it said.