 Good morning and thank you for inviting us from Ghana to present and share ideas on tax benefits policies in Ghana. One exciting thing would be that I would have the opportunity to also rest on the protocols that have been observed already by extending an appreciation to UNU Ida for making this happen. So as introduced my name is Prince Ban from the Institute of Social and Economic Research in Ghana, University of Ghana. All right, so we've had several training programs, right, supervised by the ISSA team, the GAMO team, on tax benefit policies. Now essentially for today we would out-focus on some of these policy notes that have come out of these trainings that we've had, the research retreats. So I'll share an update on government activities for last year and this year. Then I'll summarize a key policy note which is very instrumental in informing an ongoing policy debate in Ghana. Right, then I'll share a few plans we have for the next steps. So now this is just a photograph taken last year from the research retreat and I guess you can find me with my teacher brother over there in the corner. Right, so last year we had an interesting session where we invited 12 participants across six policy and research institutions and it's interesting to note that this gives us the opportunity to have policy individuals, researchers and academic individuals as well as having people from the ministries all sit together in one room to have a dispassionate argument about policy. Now the outcomes from last year's retreat were mainly two. We came up with two policy briefs. One had to do with pension scheme for agricultural rural and agricultural farmers in Ghana. Then the other is what I'll be presenting today would be a suggested hypothetical reform of the free senior high school policy in Ghana, one of the flagship policies in Ghana. We from Ghana are fortunate to have ended our yearly retreat before this conference. So that was just sometime last week. So we ended that and we also came up with four outputs from that from this year's retreats. But we will definitely focus on about two of them. So they spun across informal sector tax reforms. Then another suggested reform of the national building score policy implemented by the government. Then we have a housing subsidy reform as well as a pension reform. So I'll just move straight on to the policy brief from last year. All right now the free senior high school policy was introduced in 2017 by the government as an attempt to well the actual goal was to reduce poverty but to do that was to remove cost barriers for assessing senior secondary cycle education. So then essentially in Ghana now if a student is moving from a junior cycle to the secondary cycle is absorbed by the government. It's totally free. That is what we mean by the free senior high school policy. Now this has brought up serious fiscal pressures onto the government and then from our retreats last year we were suggesting a possible reform. It's very coincidental in the positive way that this year there is also that similar suggestion from the IMF to the government that there's a need for a rethinking about the policy and how to reform the policy to create some fiscal space for the government. So this is just to add that what we do at Gamout what UNewada is also supervising is really yielding positive internet outcomes right. So the main pillars of the policy as I mentioned the removal of cost barriers expansion of infrastructure improvement of quality and equity in education delivery then the development of employable skills but the heavy emphasis is on the removal of cost barriers. Now this is what we suggested last year and this is coming from a team of five individuals from academia. This is a diverse team from academia from the Ministry of Finance and from the Ghana Revenue Authority. Now the reform is simple that instead of the government focusing on a blanket cost absorption the government should rather focus on providing cost release for only non-residential so relieving the non-residential component of the senior high school education. So with this the hypothetical reform suggested was that the government should maintain a uniform financial benefit of 500 cities for all students and now I must admit that this is coming from the data in 2017 right. So in recent times you will be having much higher figures than this and what we will get from this is that when once that is done there will be fiscal space room for the government to pursue other social interventions. Now the main issue has been that the fiercest has taken the load on government so much that the government does not have the room to implement other social interventions. Now recognizing that we also are the complementary old age benefit scheme because that helps consolidate the poverty reduction agenda for the government. So now we put this to Gamod and Gamod does that perfectly for us by showing us what the implications would be for poverty and inequality. Now on the government expenditure side it goes without saying that definitely you are only burying the non-residential part of the student's bill there will be a cost reduction for government. So the first column is showing the the status without a reform but when we implement the free SHS reform as suggested hypothetically we find that it reduces government expenditure significantly by some 597 million ganasidis. Then the next question then is what can the government do with this with this cost saving. But then also we notice that if we implement this reform poverty doesn't do quite well because then its funds households would have received but now they don't get the benefit of these funds. So then we find that poverty increased by 0.34 percentage points. So hence our complementary policy that to help with a poverty reduction strategy the government should use these savings for an old age scheme. So this way the government gets to maintain two social interventions with the same budget. So now when we have the old age pension scheme what comes up is that it costs the government an additional 558 right but then there's a saving of 39 million ganasidis. So in all with the same budgets on free SHS the government gets to maintain free SHS policy gets to add an additional social intervention for the aged and also gets to save on 39 million ganasidis annually. Right so this is the reform suggested by the gamut scheme and instructively this also reduces the poverty the headcount poverty by 0.26 percentage points but inequality also reduces. So the argument we make for this reform is that one once this reform is adopted the government is able to subsidize maintain this program of subsidizing senior high school education significantly but also improves the poverty outcome which is reducing poverty by an additional 0.26 percentage points right. So that is a win for the government on the on the poverty side and the win for the government in the education side would also be that they they are concerned about underutilizations of what we call community day schools. So these are schools that are set up within communities which are day schools so kind of non-residential right but with the instance of the free SHS policy we find that a lot of students were driven to the boarding school what we call boarding schools because that is also taken by the government so they they didn't prefer the day schools but chose to prefer the boarding schools that let serious pressure on the boarding facilities right so with this policy we get to spread students across all institutions where now the the community day schools will be heavily utilized that also improves educational outcomes for Ghana so a win on education then there's a win on inequality where the government's concern with this reform has always been that well you say we should reform when reform it will affect poverty it will affect income inequality but here we come in and say hey no rest you can reform poverty would reduce significantly inequality would also be an issue where that would shouldn't bother government that much because we find that with the complementary policy we reduce we bridge the inequality gap with that policy so the recommendation to Samuel is that the government should focus on absorbing only the the non-residential aspect of the senior high school bill and with that government can get to consolidate all its gains associated with poverty reduction by redirecting cost savings to support the elderly and also commit to the surplus so from what I showed in the result there was a surplus that the government saves from our reform the government can commit that to improving quality education all right so now the next step to to to summit up this year we are exploring these two additional policies which have come up also in Ghana strongly the reform the housing sector reform so possibly in due time you hear you would hear from us again with our suggested reform on these thank you very much and that's the flag of Ghana