A team from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is due in Ghana for the second assessment of the country’s program with the fund,  The IMF program was homegrown and that the government was committed to keeping with fiscal discipline in order to meet the goals set under the three-year program in order to stabilize the micro-economy.

President Mahama said this when he interacted with the business community in the Ashanti Region in Kumasi last Sunday night as part of his two-day working visit to the region.

Enumerating the many programs the government was initiating to boost the private sector, the President said: “In the last two to three years, we have given very significant support to the private sector, especially in agribusiness.”

“Now private companies have been set up and they are buying our local rice for processing for both the local and export markets,” he added.

Although he expressed appreciation to the private sector for its tremendous contribution to Ghana’s economic growth, he challenged it to think outside the box to advance the growth.

The Ashanti Region, as the epicentre of business in Ghana, provides opportunity for businesses to venture into manufacturing.

President Mahama urged the private sector to stand solidly behind the government when it took tough decisions to improve the economy.

He indicated that taking such decisions did not mean he was wicked but that he wanted to restore micro-economic stability.

He also asked private businesses to pay their taxes promptly.

The President was not happy with the high interest rates charged by the banks, asking, “When you borrow at 25 per cent, what business can you do to make profit?”

Notwithstanding the challenges, he said, the Agenda for Transformation being pursued by the government was bound to turn things around by bringing down inflation, which would reflect in a reduction in interest rates.

President Mahama said efforts to resolve the power crisis were on course.

An unprecedented alliance of heads of state, city, and state leaders, has called for countries and companies around the world to put a price on carbon.

Joshua Hill writes:  The Carbon Pricing Panel, a group of leaders from around the world convened by World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim and IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, in conjunction with OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria. In all, the Carbon Pricing Panel is made up of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, French President François Hollande, Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, Philippines President Benigno Aquino III, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, Governor Jerry Brown of California, and Mayor Eduardo Paes of Rio de Janeiro.

“There has never been a global movement to put a price on carbon at this level and with this degree of unison,” said World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim.

“It marks a turning point from the debate on the economic systems needed for low carbon growth to the implementation of policies and pricing mechanisms to deliver jobs, clean growth and prosperity. The science is clear, the economics compelling and we now see political leadership emerging to take green investment to scale at a speed commensurate with the climate challenge.”

In under a month, world leaders will be meeting in Paris for the UN climate negotiations, and this new challenge from some of those who will be in attendance — including host nation President François Hollande and the ever-formidable Angela Merkel — is sure to be a topic of discussion. The group are calling on their country, state, and city counterparts from around the world “to join them in pricing carbon to steer the global economy towards a low carbon, productive, competitive future without the dangerous levels of carbon pollution driving warning.”

There are already 40 nations and 23 cities, states, and regions around the world that have implemented or are in the process of implementing a price on carbon, with a variety of programs and policy mechanisms covering approximately 12% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

“Finance ministers need to think about reforms to fiscal systems in order to raise more revenue from taxes on carbon-intensive fuels and less revenue from other taxes that are detrimental to economic performance, such as taxes on labor and capital,” said Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. “They need to evaluate the carbon tax rates that will help them meet their mitigation pledges for Paris and accompanying measures to help low-income households vulnerable to higher energy prices.”

The panel are also wielding a significant amount of private sector support, with institutions such as US institutional investor CalPERS, ENGIE of France, Mahindra Group of India, and Netherlands-based Royal DSM backing the call, and which will help link business needs with public policies through the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition, an action based platform that will be officially launched in Paris on November 30, 2015.

Xi’s state visit to Britain brings up past slights, present steel dumping and the role of the heir apparent to the British throne.

China is dumping steel because their economy is slowing.   In China, because steel is so important it is subsidized.  The steel that’s being dumped is at the price steel producers around the world can’t compete with.  In the US there are dumping tariffs.  Surely the subject will be discussed in on Xi’s state visit.

Prince Charles is a supporter of the Dhali Llama .  He is doing his duty by attending welcoming ceremonies, but will not attend a dinner at Buckingham Palace.  How does his mother feel about this? We don’t know.

Andres Velasco writes:  Latin America has a new export: populist backlash. It first landed on the warm and receptive shores of the Mediterranean, nurturing support for Greece’s Syriza and Spain’s Podemos. Now it has reached the United Kingdom.

Corbynismo, the ideology of the long-marginalized British MP Jeremy Corbyn – who admired Venezuela’s late president, Hugo Chávez, thinks Vladimir Putin was justified in invading Ukraine, and now heads Britain’s venerable Labour Party – sounds familiar to anyone acquainted with Latin America.

Of course, this new populism (Hillary Clinton’s Democratic rival Bernie Sanders is also a card-carrying member) has much fodder. But being mad is not the same as being right. The new European populists are parlaying legitimate frustration into a misguided set of policies that can only produce more of the same. Latin Americans learned this the hard way in decades past. Europeans (and perhaps Americans) may be about to as well.

Three conceptual confusions cause Corbynismo to get crucial matters completely wrong.

The market for potatoes is not like the market for loans. Yes, bankers are greedy. And, yes, financial markets require close supervision and regulation. But what is true of financial markets need not be true of other markets.

Financial markets are not disciplined by the threat of bankruptcy. When banks get into trouble, governments always save them or wish they had (think Lehman Brothers). Regulation needs to provide the discipline that markets cannot.

But followers of Corbynismo are wrong to infer that the ills of financial markets infect all other markets, all the time. Countries, whether rich or poor, do not need a Potato Supervisory Board with new and enhanced regulatory powers.

It is great to be Keynesian – but during both halves of the cycle. Yes, orthodox economists of (mostly) Teutonic origin peddle a lethal fiscal-policy prescription. When the economy is booming, they claim, expenditure must be cut.. When the economy is tanking, expenditure also has to be cut in order to restore confidence and revive investment. For some European economies, this prescription has caused a needlessly long recession.

The way to render an aggressively counter-cyclical fiscal policy feasible is by relying on modern budget rules.

We did this in Chile during the copper price boom of 2006-2008, running budget surpluses of up to eight percentage points of GDP. When Wall Street melted down, we had the fiscal room to apply one of the most aggressive anti-crisis plans anywhere.

There is nothing inevitable or God-given about suffering, injustice, and inequality. That is why modern social democrats and progressive liberals are eager to right social wrongs. But effectiveness requires agnosticism about the policies required to achieve lofty ends.

Consider health care. Different things work differently in different places. Britain has a single payer and a single service provider: the National Health Service. Canada has a single public payer but mostly private providers. Obamacare establishes a public mandate to buy private insurance (with public subsidies for the poor) to finance services provided by (mostly) private hospitals and clinics.

Rarely is a US CEO held accountable for the activities of the company he leads. Donald Leon Blankenship, former CEO of the now defunct Massy Energy Company is on trial for the death of 29 miners in the explosion at the company’s Upper Big Branch deep mine in Montcoal, West Virginia on April 5, 2010. Three invstigators have concluded that his methods contributed to the  explosion . This is the first time in 150 years of Appalachian mining that a top boss of a coal firm has ever had to answer for how he ran his company.

Responding to the Syrian refugee crisis worldwide.  Abe of Japan writes a check.

Nancy Snow writes: Last year, 5,000 people applied for refugee status in Japan. 11 were accepted.

Japan is a strong target for refugee criticism because of its modest engagement in social media and global communications. Typically, it doesn’t proactively make its case to the world, largely allowing the international press and the Twitterverse to frame its issues for it.

The Washington Post article, comparing the refugee response of Europe with Japan’s closed doors, quotes heavily from Twitter messages that argue for opening the doors to refugees in Japan.

Accepting refugees to Japan is not unprecedented, just very limited. Between 1978 and 2005, Japan accepted over 11,000 Indo-Chinese refugees fleeing the Vietnam conflict. Japan was the first Asian country in 2010 to participate in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ resettlement program, a pilot program to bring 90 Myanmar refugees from Thailand over the course of three years.

Where Japan shines is in providing assistance as a leading humanitarian nation. It is a top official development assistance (ODA) country, just below the United States, United Kingdom and Germany. International aid ostensibly greatly improves the lives of refugees. But because Japan is not a top host nation for refugees, it is vulnerable to critical global media stories singling it out as a rich country that takes in the least refugees. In contrast, Germany is celebrated for opening arms wide to take in up to half a million refugees. Germany may be facing incredible burdens from this population infusion, but its liberal refugee policy blowback may take years.

Germany was the Cinderella of the refugee crisis and Japan the Evil Stepmother before Abe’s address to the United Nations on Sept. 29. Abe announced a tripling of the budget from last year to $810 million in assistance to refugees and internally displaced people in Syria and Iraq.

The refugee criticism of Japan risked threatening an image that Japanese leaders have attempted to cultivate in developing nation brand Japan as a compassionate leader in the world. One of Japan’s most honored citizens, Madame Sadako Ogata, high commissioner of the U.N.’s refugee agency for a decade (1991-2000), remains one of the country’s most honored citizens. At age 88, she remains president of the Japan International Cooperation Agency, a Tokyo-based developmental organization that works to alleviate poverty, as one mission.

The focus on Syria may also carry with it a bitter memory for many Japanese. This past January, Abe announced a $100 million donation to help the countries of the Middle East fighting Islamic State inside their borders. Within a few days, Muslim militants with IS beheaded Kenji Goto, a journalist, and Haruna Yukawa, the Japanese hostage that Goto had gone to Syria to attempt to rescue.

Abe’s tripling of humanitarian assistance for refugees and internally displaced people in the Middle East is notable.