The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has appealed to businesses to cooperate with their outfit in enabling them to carry out the business tracker survey successfully.
The business tracker is in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank, seeks to assess the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on businesses in Ghana. It will involve the use of telephone interviews for data collection and will measure the impact of the disease on small, medium and large-scale establishments operating in the country.
Government Statistician, Prof. Samuel Kobina Annim in an interview said they will strictly adhere to confidentiality in conducting the survey.
“It’s important that we ensure that these businesses stay in business so that there would be the injection that a country would need as far as output is concerned. Through this medium, we are encouraging all Ghanaians and businesses to support Ghana Statistical service in tracking the effect or impact of COVID-19 on businesses in the country. We request for full cooperation and we assure businesses that information that will be put out there will be confidential as the Statistical Service Act 2019 indicates that information collected would not be shared with anybody and the information that will be put out there will be at the aggregate level and then there wouldn’t be any identifiers to help track businesses that are providing us with this information,” he said.
The emergence of COVID-19 in November 2019 has led to tremendous changes in projections of the global economy. The virus has not only had a toll on the health of people across the globe but also, the International Monetary Fund has projected that the virus may lead the global economy to a recession, worse than the financial crisis of 2009.
The effect of the virus on the economy includes the rising unemployment levels due to closure of businesses. Coupled with this is the increase in inflation rate which is caused by global shortages of not only health equipment, but also global food supplies.
Currently, Ghana has now recorded 7,117 cases of COVID-19, with 34 deaths and over 2,317 recoveries.
