Ghana's Minister for Finance, Dr Cassiel Ato Forson, presented the 2027 budget to Parliament on November 12, 2026, stating that Ghana's boom-and-bust cycles must cease.
The budget sees two causes of instability: dependence on raw commodity exports and fiscal indiscipline. Prof. Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng says the Minister has made the right diagnosis but prescribed an incomplete cure.
The budget statement admits that past governments repaired the public finances but did not use the recovery to alter the structure of the economy. It pledges that fiscal discipline will apply throughout the election cycle. However, the budget misses a third cause of the boom-and-bust cycle: Ghana's inability to make its own machines and spare parts.
The New Economy programme allocates GHS 30 billion, with GHS 800 million for procurement of agricultural machinery and GHS 51 million for the completion of the Foundry and Machine Tooling Centre. The Centre is the only line in the budget about making machines rather than buying them.
Prof. Frimpong-Boateng says that if the New Economy succeeds, Ghana will still be dependent on imported equipment and spares, which will put pressure on the cedi.
The budget's own figures show that the capacity to make machines stands low in the Government's order of priorities. The Foundry and Machine Tooling Centre receives about 0.17 percent of the New Economy outlay, and one-sixteenth of what will be spent on imported farm machinery in the same year.
Prof. Frimpong-Boateng warns that the next bust will come when commodity prices fall, export earnings drop, but the bill for machines and spares remains high.
The programme is financed partly by lowering the primary surplus target by one percentage point of GDP. Prof. Frimpong-Boateng says that value addition on imported capital goods moves the bottleneck but does not remove it. He quotes the budget itself, which names commodity price volatility as the first of its five principal risks.