Economies after colonialism: Ghana and the struggle for power

Despite Ghana's strong democratic track record in recent decades, the economy remains underdeveloped. Industrial policies are necessary to transform the colonial trading economy that Ghana inherited at independence, but successive governments have been unwilling or unable to implement them. In this highly original interpretation, supported by new empirical material, Lindsay Whitfield exposes the reasons for why the Ghanaian economy remains underdeveloped and sets her theory in the wider African context. She offers a new way of thinking about the political economy of Africa that charts a clear path away from defining Africa in terms of neopatrimonial politics and that provides new conceptual tools for addressing what kind of business-state relations are necessary to drive economic development. As a study of Ghana that addresses both the economy and politics from early colonialism to the present day, this is a must-read for any student or scholar interested in the political economy of development in Africa

"This book is about economic development in Ghana. As the great economist Alice Amsden put it, development entails moving the economy away from being a set of assets based on primary products exploited by unskilled labour toward an economy built on knowledge-based assets exploited by skilled labour. Most African countries have struggled to achieve a greater degree of economic development. In fact, few developing countries since the breakup of colonial empires and the emergence of new countries in the twentieth century have achieved significant economic development, and most of them are in Asia"--