Abstract:
Ghana commenced the commercial production of oil in 2010 with the
subsequent passage of the Petroleum Revenue Management Act, 2011 (Act
815) and the Income Tax Law to govern the management of the petroleum
revenues. In spite of Act 815 as amended, Act 893 in 2015, regarding
sustainable revenue management; government’s expenditure from the Ghana
Petroleum Fund on recurrent and non-capital items creates sources for concern.
This study therefore, was set out to examine the various petroleum revenue
sources in Ghana, their trends and proportions over a seven-year period (2011
2017). Secondary petroleum revenue data from the annual reports of the
Ministry of Finance were subjected to descriptive statistics, frequencies, graphs,
cross tabulations and content analysis. During the period under review, the
operations of three oil fields such as the Jubilee, TEN and Saltpond fields had
been identified. With respect to the provisions of Section 21(4), no further
revenue allocations had been made into the Ghana Infrastructure Investment
Fund after it received a total of US$6.92 million from the first TEN lifting in
the first quarter of the 2017 budget. This, in addition to weakening the
fundamentals of the economy has damning implications for other sectors of the
economy as well. In other to encourage allocations into the GIIF, Section 21(4)
can be amended to set a minimum cap of say 10% or 15% and also restrict the
implementation of policies whose infrastructural needs have not been met by
say 70 to 80 percent. This would boost public investment expenditure in the
domestic market and increase development of other sectors in the economy,
leading to direct or indirect income gains to supplement any marginal gains of
Petroleum Holding Fund income (PHFI).
