The Ramifications of the Treasury Single Account, the Ifmis Platform, and Government Cash Management in Developing Economies in the Wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic: Ghana’s Empirical Example

Abstract

In recent years, the combined effects of inflation, recession, high-interest rates, new investment media and technological advances in information processing have made “Cash Management” an increasingly important and complex subject (IMF, 2001; Ter-Minassian and Parente, 1995). At times, the desire and effort to squeeze out the most from every dollar and to minimise idle cash balances has become an obsession with many organisations and countries. Therefore, effective and efficient Cash Management has become a “sine qua non” for the success of any business organisation (Horcher, 2006a; White, 2006). And Countries, “as Corporate Entities”, are no exceptions to this basic fundamental business principle (Wood & Sangster, 2012). The Theoretical Framework of this study was underpinned by the Stakeholder Theory (Freeman, 1984), the Financial Management Theory (Hayes and Nolan, 1974; Kingston, 1973), and the Modern Money Theory (Friedman, 1964; Keynes, 1930; Mitchell-Innes, 1914). We conducted a cross-sectional research through non-probability and purposive sampling with 200 respondents. Our face-to-face interviews, structured closed-ended and open-ended Questionnaires which were administered online through email application via Google Forms (as a result of the novel, dreaded, and disruptive Covid-19 pandemic), coupled with PETS (Khan and Pessoa, 2010; Reinikka and Svennson, 2006) resulted in startling revelations. Our major finding was that a government lacking an efficient and effective control over its cash resources will definitely pay for its institutional deficiencies in multiple ways (Ahmed, 2016).