Mahama’s Unemployment Claims Under Scrutiny by IERPP
The Institute of Economic Research and Public Policy, IERPP, has noted with concern the misleading manner His Excellency John Dramani Mahama and his ministers are quoting Ghana’s rates of unemployment.
President John Mahama has been quoting figures as the rates of unemployment which are not accurate. To this end, the Institute of Economic Research and Public Policy, IERPP, would like to set the records straight for the education of the President his appointees and the Ghanaian public.
The Ghana Statistical Service’s official unemployment rate as at the end of 2016 was 5.2%. As at the end of 2023, the unemployment rate had fallen to 3%. These figures, it must be emphasized, were arrived at using the Narrow Measure of Unemployment.
The Statistical Service, in its recent survey, employed the Broad Measure of Unemployment in quantifying Ghana’s unemployment rate. The survey put the unemployment rate at 14.7%.
This 14.7% is the figure President John Mahama has been persistently quoting in his speeches to suggest that the rate of unemployment went astronomically high under the erstwhile Akufo-Addo administration.
This misleading analysis was recently re-echoed by Felix Kwakye Ofosu, the Spokesperson to the President and Minister in charge of Government Communications on TV3’s KeyPoint show.
President Mahama and his appointees fail to differentiate between the Narrow and Broad Measure methods in measuring the rates of unemployment in the country.
It is, therefore, erroneous for President Mahama and his appointees to quote the current unemployment rate as 14.7% and compare it to the 5.2% he left behind in 2016 because the methodologies used for the 5.2% in 2016 and 2024 are not the same.
Using the Narrow Measure method, Mahama’s unemployment rate was 5.2% and that of Akufo-Addo was 3% at the end of 2023. These two are comparable. The 14.7% fell under the Broad Measure method of measuring the rate of unemployment.
It is the hope of IERPP that President Mahama and his appointees would refrain from comparing unemployment rates measured using two completely different methodologies in any dialogue about unemployment in Ghana.
