Ghana

This chapter looks at how W. Arthur Lewis left Ghana as a member of the Ghanaian delegation to the all-African conference meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He did not return. In Addis, he announced his intention to take up a new post at the United Nations. He did not, however, sever his ties with Ghana, and he was to return briefly in 1963 to offer advice on the Seven-Year Development Plan. Because he had not had time to train a replacement, his departure left the Ghanaians without a fulltime economic adviser. The responsibility for drafting the budget and overseeing the five-year plan devolved on a variety of outside consultants and Ghanaian ministers themselves. At first Ghana drifted in the direction of more state controls over the economy and greater suspicion of the free market; but by 1960 and 1961 the drift had become a full-scale push as the state began to replace the Lewis programs that had featured a mixed economy with ones that looked exclusively to the state. The early pressures to scrap the Lewis economic policies and move to the left came as much in response to problems that had haunted the Ghanaian economy throughout the late 1950s as to ideology, notably trade and budgetary deficits.

Delegation · Economics · Economy · Ideology · Political science · Politics · State (computer science) · African history and culture studies · International Development and Aid · Law