Ghana’s Deputy Minister of Finance, Kwaku Kwarteng, visited IFS on Friday 5 May 2017 to discuss our partnership and ongoing work programme with the Ministry of Finance (MoF) and the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA).

Deputy Minister Kwarteng was joined by Kofi Nti (Commissioner General of the GRA), Anthony Dzadzra (Director of the Revenue Policy Division at the MoF) and Ama Blankson-Anaman (Economics Advisor at the Department for International Development (DFID)).

During the meeting, the delegation from Ghana identified priority areas for tax policy research for the Government of Ghana, and IFS researchers discussed the use of evidence and the role of tax policy analysis in informing government policy and public debate in both the UK and Ghana.

The visit also provided an opportunity to discuss IFS's ongoing projects in Ghana, which are being implemented in collaboration with civil servants. These include the development a microsimulation model to simulate the impact of proposed tax and transfer policy changes on revenues and households along the income distribution, and the provision of support to the MoF and GRA to rigorously cost tax policy proposals, and to increase their use of taxpayer-level administrative data to improve the precision of analysis.  

IFS' work in Ghana is funded by DFID as part of our Centre for Tax Analysis in Developing Countries (TAXDEV). You can find more information about TAXDEV here: https://www.ifs.org.uk/centres/taxdev/