The Ministry of Finance has proposed a new Industrialization Committee that is geared at helping importers and industries to begin manufacturing some products they would buy from other countries.
The move is in connection with the benchmark values reduction policy.
The government has concluded on a 30 percent discount for all goods and a 10 percent discount for vehicles on the benchmark values reduction policy.
The initially proposed discount was 50% that should be applied on the benchmark values of selected goods imported into the country, while a 30 percent discount was applied on vehicles.
However, the Ministry of Finance added in its announcement of the phased reversal of the benchmark values discount policy will kick start from March 1, 2022.
According to the Ministry, revision is the first step in a phased approach to reversing the Benchmark Values Reduction policy completely.
The Ministry of Finance said the Industrialization Committee would help importers to produce commodities that they would have to import and as well help the government’s industrialization move.
“The Industrialization Committee will help our traders to move from being just importers to being able to produce locally some of the things they import. This we believe will go a long way to help us in our industrialization. We believe that we should start small. The things we import, what can we do to reduce our dependence on these imports.
“So we want to bring this committee together to see how best we can streamline and make it possible for some of our importers to be able to set up factories here,” A Deputy Minister of Finance, Abena Osei-Asare told Accra based CITI FM.
Meanwhile, the Ghana Union of Traders Associations (GUTA) has pleaded with the government to hasten slowly on the implementation.
“We’re pleading with the government to hasten slowly. Because then it would mean that we’re being reversed to the old problem. So once the benchmark has increased in a way, we should study and see the impact and see how we can get a mitigating factor before we can think about reversing it completely,” President of GUTA, Dr. Joseph Obeng stated.
Source: Ghana/Starrfm.com.gh/103.5FM
