Economist Professor Godfred Alufar Bokpin has cautioned that while the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod) has made significant gains in retaining foreign exchange from the country’s gold sector, the intervention has also imposed substantial costs on the economy.
Speaking on Joy News’ PM Express on Tuesday, Prof. Bokpin said GoldBod’s first year had demonstrated clear benefits, particularly in reducing the gap between Ghana’s reported gold exports and the volumes recorded by destination countries.
He said the narrowing of the gap suggested that GoldBod had helped bring more gold-related foreign exchange into the formal economy and deserved credit for that achievement.
However, he argued that the gains must be assessed alongside the financial losses incurred through the domestic gold purchasing programme.
According to him, weaknesses in the programme’s original design contributed to avoidable losses that could have been reduced through stronger planning and expert input.
“There were design defects in the programme,” Prof. Bokpin said, arguing that a comprehensive assessment of the entire gold value chain could have produced a more efficient intervention.
He explained that the policy choices made by the two major political parties before the 2024 elections reflected different approaches to the same challenge.
While the NPP proposed lowering the final withholding tax on gold exports by artisanal and small-scale miners to encourage formal declarations, the NDC opted for the creation of GoldBod, modelled in part on the role played by COCOBOD in the cocoa sector.
Prof. Bokpin also disputed claims that GoldBod should receive direct credit for Ghana’s broader macroeconomic stability.
He maintained that macroeconomic stability is primarily driven by fiscal policy and monetary policy, with the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Ghana playing the central roles.
He further argued that the losses incurred by the Bank of Ghana and the revenue forgone following the abolition of the 1.5% withholding tax on artisanal and small-scale gold producers should form part of any comprehensive assessment of GoldBod.
With artisanal and small-scale gold exports exceeding $10 billion, he said the fiscal implications of the tax policy could be significant, particularly when measured against potential spending on roads, schools and other public infrastructure.
Prof. Bokpin therefore warned that the overall cost of the intervention could be considerably higher than the figures currently being cited.
Despite these concerns, he maintained that GoldBod’s foreign exchange retention role has delivered substantial economic benefits.
He said the key challenge now was to ensure that those benefits were achieved at a much lower cost.
Prof. Bokpin noted that the government, GoldBod and the Bank of Ghana had themselves recognised that the existing level of losses was unsustainable.
He said the planned exit strategy was therefore intended to bring the losses down from an estimated 14.5–17 percent to around 5 percent.
For Prof. Bokpin, the next phase of GoldBod should focus not only on retaining foreign exchange but also on redesigning the intervention to minimise fiscal and financial losses across the entire gold value chain.
