Economist, Professor Eric Osei-Assibey has stated that Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia’s presentation on the state of the economy was factual, credible and verifiable.
“I mean, he spoke to facts, and the facts are all verifiable,” he said on JoyNews’ PM Express Business Edition on Thursday.
According to the Economist, it was crucial for the Vice President who doubles as the Chairman of the Economic Management Team to provide credible and factual information at this time to boost investor confidence.
“In economic management, information plays a critical role, in the sense that people want credible information to plan, to actually forecast, to internalize it in their costing, in their pricing and I mean in so many ways in their speculative activities.
“So at any given time, they want credible information and so when you don’t put out information, and it’s not just about information, the information has to be credible, it has to be factual, it has to be empirically verifiable or you should be able to find out whether this information is true or not.
“If the market finds out that this information that is being churned out is false, is not credible, you as a government actually cause reputational damage to yourself; you fall definitely into a trap that will be difficult for you to get out. I mean, next time when you speak, no one takes you serious,” he explained.
Prof. Osei-Assibey noted that most of Dr. Bawumia’s facts and data can easily be verified and hence not up for debate.
“You can take the Bank of Ghana recent NPC announcement, the data that was produced and if you take the Fitch and Moody’s reports data has been produced, so these are all verifiable facts that we can all go and check.
“And I’ve just been doing my crosschecking and I’ve realised that most of the things that were put out were credible, they were factual, you can actually go and check it to see that indeed whether inflation has not been rising, indeed if you’ll not find before 2019 inflation got into single digits and that is around 7.5 the average about 7.6% over the three previous years.
“And you could clearly see that interest rate was trending downwards so it is difficult to debate, to say anything other than what has been presented.
“Of course, the reason behind the numbers can be debatable, it’s economics, and everyone will obviously have a different opinion just as we often say that economic opinions are like noses, everyone has his/hers. But then facts are facts, there’s no way you can deny facts so long as it is written in black and white,” Prof. Osei-Assibey added.
