Ghana’s informal sector valued at $7.7 billion; grows by 5.9% in 2019

This is the second highest after the rebasing of the economy. This means that the GSS now uses 2013 as the base year for calculating.

From the calculations, the informal sector at the end of 2019 was worth GHC45.2 billion cedis ($7,793,103,308).

This is the highest value for the last three years.

The figures from the GSS showed that the value of all economic activities in the informal sector for 2019 reached GHC92.5billion.

Ghana’s informal sector largely involves buying and selling of goods.

This represents an increase of 26.5% compared to the 2018 figure of 27%.

However, when inflation was factored in, with reference to prices of goods and services for 2013 as the base year, the value of the informal sector recorded GHC45.2 billion.

This represents a growth of 5.9% in 2019 after the informal sector recorded a drop in growth at 2.6% the previous year (2018).

Meanwhile, indirect taxes share of the total value of all goods and services with 2013 as the base year, reached GHC9.09 billion.

This is the highest compared to the 7.96% and GHC8.56 billion recorded in 2017 and 2018 respectively.

However, a comparison of the growth rate for the last three years shows that the highest growth was recorded in 2018 at 7.5%, followed by 6.1% in 2019 and 4.6% in 2017.