Ghana’s Debt Stock Hits 236.1 Billion

New figures released by the Bank of Ghana show that the country’s debt stock increased by 16.9 billion cedis in the first quarter of 2020, that’s from January to March.

The figures, which were contained in the Bank of Ghana’s Summary of Economic and Financial Data pegs the country’s total debt stock by March 2020 at 236.1 billion cedis, representing 59.3 percent of the GDP.

According to the data, Ghana’s debt increased from 219.2 billion cedis in January this year, to 236.1 billion cedis by March 2020.

A breakdown of the data shows that Ghana’s debt increased by 38.1 billion cedis on year-on-year basis, which is from March 2019 to March 2020.

On the domestic side, the debt stock stood at 111.3 billion cedis, while the external component of the debt reached 124.8 billion cedis.

In the banking sector, Total Assets of banks grew from 111.2 billion cedis in March 2019, compared to 133.5 billion cedis in March 2020. Total deposits also increased from 73 billion cedis to 84 billion cedis within the same period.

On the external sector development, the data showed that Ghana’s total export receipts dropped to 3.9 billion dollars in March 2020, compared to 4 billion dollars in March 2019.

Gold fetched the country 1.4 billion dollars, while cocoa and oil brought in 959.5 million dollars and 874.1 million dollars respectively by the first quarter of the year.

On the import side, total import within the first three months of the year stood at 2.9 billion dollars. Import of oil recorded 511 million dollars while non-oil import was at 2.48 billion dollars.