New figures released by the Bank of Ghana shows that the country’s debt stock has increased by 16.9 billion Cedis in the first quarter of 2020.
The figures, which were contained in the Bank of Ghana’s Summary of Economic and Financial Data placed the country’s total debt stock by March 2020 at 236.1 billion Cedis, representing 59.3 per cent of the GDP.
According to the data provided shows that Ghana’s debt increased from 219.2 billion Cedis in January this year, to 236.1 billion Cedis by March 2020.
A breakdown indicates that the country’s debt increased by 38.1 billion Cedis on a year-on-year basis, which is from March 2019 to March 2020.
Further Breakdown
On the domestic side, the debt stock stood at 111.3 billion Cedis, while the external component of the debt reached 124.8 billion Cedis.
In the banking sector, Total Assets of banks grew from 111.2 billion Cedis in March 2019, compared to 133.5 billion Cedis in March 2020.
Total deposits also increased from 73 billion Cedis to 84 billion Cedis within the same period.
For cheques cleared, Total Transaction Value increased to 15.1 billion Cedis for March 2020 as against 13.6 billion cedis for the same period last year.
However, the total number of transactions from March 2019 to March 2020 neither rose or declined as it maintained a total of 562 thousand under cheques cleared.
On the external sector development, the data disclosed that Ghana’s total export receipts dropped to 3.9 billion dollars in March 2020, compared to 4 billion dollars in March 2019.
Commodities such as gold fetched the country 1.4 billion dollars, while cocoa and oil brought in 959.5 million dollars and 874.1 million dollars respectively by the first quarter of the year.
On the side of imports, total import within the first three months of the year stood at 2.9 billion dollars.
Import of oil recorded 511 million dollars while non-oil import was at 2.48 billion dollars.
On the part of mobile money services, registered mobile money accounts increased to 34.3 million for March 2020 as against 29.6 million in 2019.
This brought the total number of active mobile money accounts to 14.8 million for 2020 first quarter compared to 12.7 million for the same period last year.
So as a result, the total value of transactions also made a rise by 33.8 billion Cedis for 2020 compared to 23.4 billion cedis within the same quarter in 2019.
Balance on float also saw an increase from 2.7 billion Cedis to 3.9 billion Cedis from March 2019 to March 2020.
Additionally, the Bank of Ghana noted that the figures provided were subject to review as and when necessary.
