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THE ECONOMY OF GHANA SIXTY YEARS
AFTER INDEPENDENCE

TheEconomyof
GhanaSixtyYears
afterIndependence
Edited by
ERNEST ARYEETEY
and
RAVI KANBUR
1

3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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© the various contributors 2017
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2017
Impression: 1
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OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF –FIRST PROOF, 6/1/2017, SPi

Acknowledgements
The Editors would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Sue Snyder of
Cornell University as the administrative anchor of the project.

Preface
Ghana will celebrate 60 years of independence in 2017. As one of theﬁrst
countries to receive independence in sub-Saharan Africa, Ghana’s development
has been followed with great interest by the development community. After a
period of high growth in theﬁrst two decades of independence the economy fell
into a deep slump through the 1980s. Economic recovery gathered pace through
the 1990s, alongside a restoration of democracy after a long period of intermittent
military rule.
At the 50th anniversary of Ghana’s independence in 2007, political stability and
economic growth gave some cause for optimism, even though it was noted by
many observers that Ghana’s economy had not achieved the structural transform-
ation to a more diversiﬁed production base that was desired by policymakers. At
the same time, oil and gas discoveries held out the prospect for an oil boom which
could underpin further economic development, although there were worries
about the natural resource curse witnessed in many resource rich countries.
As Ghana approaches its 60th birthday, it would be fair to say that optimism
and worries for the future continue to be present in equal measure. Economic
growth in the last decade has been high by historical standards. Indeed, recent
rebasing of gross domestic product (GDP)ﬁgures has put Ghana over the per
capita income threshold into middle-income country status. However, structural
transformation has lagged behind. Further,ﬁscal discipline has eroded signiﬁ-
cantly and heavy borrowing especially on the commercial market is being engaged
in, while elements of the natural resource curse have already manifested them-
selves. The question most observers ask is whether the gains from two decades of
reforms are being reversed.
Given this background, this volume brings together leading established and
young economists, from within and outside Ghana, to analyse and assess the
challenges facing Ghana’s economy as it enters its seventh decade and the nation
heads towards three-quarters of a century of independence. The chapters in the
volume cover the major macroeconomic and sectoral issues, includingﬁscal and
monetary policy, trade and industrialization, agriculture, and infrastructure. The
volume also covers the full range of social issues including poverty and inequality,
education, health, gender, and social protection.
Our hope is that this volume will take its place as a contribution to the ongoing
debate and discussion on the future and the promise of Ghana’s economy to
fashion a better life for its citizens.
Ernest Aryeetey
Ravi Kanbur

Contents
List of Figures xi
List of Tables xv
List of Contributors xix
PART I. THEMATIC ISSUES
1. Ghana at Sixty: Learning from a Developing African Nation’s Past 3
Ernest Aryeetey and Ravi Kanbur
2. W. Arthur Lewis and the Roots of Ghanaian Economic Policy 16
Ravi Kanbur
3. Property and Freedom 28
Franklin Obeng-Odoom
PART II. MACROECONOMY AND FINANCE
4. Economic Growth in Ghana: Trends and Structure, 1960–2014 45
Ernest Aryeetey and Ama Pokuaa Fenny
5. Sixty Years of Fiscal Policy in Ghana: Outcomes and Lessons 66
Robert Darko Osei and Henry Telli
6. Monetary Policy and Inﬂation Management in Ghana: Inﬂation
Targeting and Outcomes 88
Peter Quartey, Bernice Owusu-Brown, and Festus Ebo Turkson
7. Trade and Exchange Rate Policies since Independence and
Prospects for the Future 103
A. D. Amarquaye Laryea and Bernardin Senadza
8. Banking and Capital Markets: The Evolution of Ghana’s Financial
Sector and Future Prospects 117
Sam Mensah
9. Oil and Ghana’s Economy 137
Augustin Kwasi Fosu
PART III. SECTORAL PERSPECTIVES
10. Flickering Decades of Agriculture and Agricultural Policy 157
Fred Mawunyo Dzanku and Christopher Udry
11. Industrial Policy in Ghana: From a Dominant State to
Resource Abundance 176
Nkechi S. Owoo and John Page

12. Formal and Informal Enterprises as Drivers and
Absorbers of Employment 192
William F. Steel
13. Urbanization in Ghana: Retrospect and Prospects 207
George Owusu and Paul W. K. Yankson
14. State of Ghana’s Infrastructure and its Implications
for Economic Development 223
Edward Nketiah-Amponsah and Patricia Woedem Aidam
15. Managing the Environment for Development 242
Daniel K. Twerefou and K. A. Tutu
16. Mining in Ghana: Critical Reﬂections on a Turbulent Past
and Uncertain Future 261
Gavin Hilson and Abigail Hilson
PART IV. HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
17. Inequality and Poverty in Ghana 279
Andy McKay and Eric Osei-Assibey
18. Employment and Labour Market 299
William Baah-Boateng
19. Closing the Gender Gaps in Ghana 317
Abena D. Oduro and Charles G. Ackah
20. The Prospects and Challenges of a Youthful Population in
Achieving Economic and Social Transformation in Ghana 333
Emmanuel A. Codjoe
21. Education in Ghana: Access, Quality, and Prospects for Reforms 349
Kwabena Gyimah-Brempong
22. Health and Healthcare in Ghana, 1957–2017 365
Ama de-Graft Aikins and Kwadwo Koram
23. Social Health Insurance in Ghana: The Politics, Economics,
and the Future 385
Isaac Osei-Akoto and Clement Adamba
Index 401
x Contents

List of Figures
4.1. GDP growth rate, 1960–2014 46
4.2. GDP growth, 1960–1983 47
4.3. Capital investment, 1960–1983 49
4.4. Savings; value and share of GDP, 1975–1983 50
4.5. Money supply growth, 1960–1983 51
4.6. Trade balance as per cent of GDP 52
4.7. GDP growth, 1983–1995 53
4.8. GDP growth, 1995–2010 56
4.9. Sectoral contributions to GDP, 1996–2009 57
4.10. Budget deﬁcit, 1996–2008 58
4.11. Trends in exports and imports, 1993–2010 59
5.1. Trends in overallﬁscal deﬁcits for Ghana, 1950–2014 69
5.2. Trends in broad government expenditures for Ghana, 1950–2014 69
5.3. Trends in broad governmentﬁscals for Ghana, 1950–2014 70
5.4. Trends in tax and non-tax revenue for Ghana, 1950–2014 71
5.5. Trends in the extent of slippages for Ghana, 2005–2014 75
5.6. Scatter plot of deﬁcits and government expenditures for Ghana, 1970–2014 76
5.7. Scatter plot of deﬁcits and government expenditures for Ghana, 1970–2014 76
5.8. Scatter plot of deﬁcits and government revenues for Ghana, 1970–2014 77
5.9. Fiscal deﬁcits and GDPPC growth for selected years, Ghana and comparator
countries 79
5.10. Expenditure and GDPPC growth for selected years, Ghana and comparator
countries 80
5.11. Government revenue and GDPPC growth for selected years, Ghana and
comparator countries 81
5.12. Correlates of growth andﬁscal indicators for Ghana, 1957–2014 82
6.1. Transmission mechanism 91
6.2. Interest rates, 2003–2014 95
6.3. Monetary policy regimes, money growth, and inﬂation rates, 1970–2014 97
7.1. Growth of per capita real GDP (%), 1961–2013 112
7.2. Total trade as per cent of GDP, 1961–2013 112
7.3. Trade deﬁcit as per cent of GDP, 1961–2013 113
7.4. External debt as per cent of GNI, 1961–2012 115
8.1. The dialectic ofﬁnancial sector change in Ghana 118
8.2. Nominal and real interest rates, 1971–1983 123
8.3. Market capitalization/GDP 128
8.4. Number of listed companies, 1991–2014 129

8.5. Interest rate spread, 2014 133
9.1. Share of petroleum output in GDP (%) 138
9.2. Share of petroleum output in industry (%) 139
9.3. Sectoral patterns of the Ghanaian economy, 2000–2014 139
9.4. Share of petroleum output in mining and quarrying (%) 140
9.5. Share of petroleum exports in total exports (%) 140
9.6. Share of petroleum revenue in domestic revenue (%) 142
9.7. Ghana’s petroleum revenue allocation 146
10.1. A negative relationship is observed between agricultural GDP share and
economic growth, 1960–2014 159
10.2. Relationship between agricultural productivity and labour shift from
agriculture to nonagriculture, 1960–2014 160
10.3. Agricultural value added growth has been much more erratic than overall
GDP growth 162
10.4. There is a positive association between cocoa producer price and output,
1957–2014 166
11.1. Sectoral contributions to GDP, 1970–1984 178
11.2. Share of sub-sector in total industrial GDP 179
11.3. Sub-sectoral contributions to industrial GDP, 2006–2012 181
12.1. Sectoral composition of GDP, 1957–2013 195
12.2. Male and female active employment participation rates, 1960–2013 197
12.3. Shares in total employment (ages 15–64), 1960–2013 198
12.4. Shares of employment absorption by period, 1960–2013 (%) 199
12.5. Detailed shares of employment absorption, 1992–2006 and 2006–2013 200
12.6. Sectoral distribution of informal self-employment, 1991–1992 and
2005–2006 203
13.1. Ghana: urbanization growth rate and real GDP growth rate 208
14.1. Ghana’s air transport freight in relation to her comparator countries 232
14.2. Ghana’s internet users (per 100 people) in relation to her
comparator countries 233
14.3. Ghana’s telephone lines (per 100 people) in relation to her
comparator countries 233
14.4. Ghana’s paved road (% of total roads) in relation to her comparator
countries 234
15.1. Trends in emissions by type of gas (TgCO
2e) 246
15.2. Annual freshwater withdrawals by sector as a percentage of total
freshwater withdrawal 253
15.3. Trends in resource rent as a percentage of GDP 254
16.1. Mineral revenue in Ghana, 2013 (US$ millions) 268
17.1. Highest educational level: secondary or higher by wealth quintile,1988–2008 292
17.2. Under-ﬁve mortality per 1000 live births, 1993–2008 293
17.3. Vaccinations by background characteristics, 1993 and 2008 294
17.4. Trends in stunting, underweight and wasting, 1988–2008 295
xii List of Figures

18.1. Educational attainment of Ghanaian workforce, 1960–2013 (%) 302
18.2. Growth of employment and GDP, 1960–2013 303
18.3a. Employment distribution by economic sector, 1960–2013 (%) 304
18.3b. Sectoral composition of GDP, 1960–2014 (%) 304
18.4. Real national daily minimum wage and earnings 307
18.5. Unemployment by level of education 310
20.1. Trends in population size, 1921–2015 334
20.2. Ghana population pyramid, 2010 336
22.1. The WHO health systems building blocks (concepts and strategies for
strengthening health systems) 370
23.1. Change in total revenue of the NHIF and claims paid to service
providers (%) 391
List of Figures xiii

List of Tables
3.1. Private land purchases in Ghana 31
3.2. Corporate land investment-driven displacements, 2002–2012 33
4.1. Average annual real growth of GDP and agriculture 48
4.2. Industrial sector performance, 1971–1983 48
4.3. Fiscal deﬁcit, 1970–1983 50
4.4. Contribution from oil to GDP, 2010–2014 60
4.5. Growth by sector, 2010–2014 61
4.6. Actual oil revenue relative to selectedﬁscal indicators 61
5.1. Pairwise Granger causality tests for GDP and otherﬁscal variables 84
6.1. Monetary policy and target 89
6.2. Selected macroeconomic indicators, 2003–2014 96
8.1. Financial Sector Indicators, 1970–1983 122
8.2. Size and concentration of banks, 1989–1996 126
8.3. Stock market indicators for selected African markets, 2012 129
8.4. Selected banking indicators 131
8.5. Growth of capital market institutions in Ghana 132
9.1. Real GDP growth rates: overall and non-oil (%) 138
9.2. Oil and developments in balance of payments (USD mil.) 141
9.3. Sources of petroleum revenue, 2011–2014 141
9.4. Terms of trade, and Ghana’s economic growth and export performance (%) 143
9.5. Distributed-lag regression results: terms of trade and Ghana’s GDP growth,
1960–2007 (dependent variable = GGDP) 144
9.6. Distribution of petroleum receipts, 2011–2014 (US$ millions,
unless indicated) 149
9.7. Measures of institutional quality (IQ)—Ghana vs. SSA, 2011–2014 151
10.1. Both agricultural employment share and agricultural GDP share has been
declining over time 158
10.2. There is a strong link from agricultural growth to non-agricultural growth,
the reverse is not so strong 161
10.3. Growth in overall and agricultural performance since independence (%) 163
10.4. Growth performance of some agriculture sub-sector indicators (%) 164
10.5. Proportion of household involved in agricultural production 168
10.6. In most cases farm sizes have either increased marginally or remained
largely unchanged 168
10.7. Yields have generally been erratic and much lower than that provided
by the macro data 169
10.8. The share of households using chemical fertilizer and quantity of fertilizer
use is increasing over time 170

10.9. Combining non-exports with non-farm work is not welfare reducing,
particularly in rural areas 171
10.10. Average partial effects and elasticities of poverty with respect to
agricultural productivity 173
12.1. Public and private shares of formal wage employment (ages 15–64),
1992–2013 197
12.2. Summary of strategy, sectors, and employment trends by period 202
13.1. Proportion of urban population and annual growth rate, national and
region, 1960–2010 209
13.2. Selected list of urban development and related policies 215
14.1. Progress on some of the projects from 2012–2014 225
14.2. Overview of aircraft, passenger, and freight movement (international) 227
14.3. Main sources of water supply for drinking per locality 228
14.4. Proportion of population using improved drinking water sources (total) 229
14.5. Transmission losses since 2008 230
14.6. Pearson correlation analysis of the relationship between economic growth
and infrastructural development variables 237
15.1. Some environmental related policies and legislation 245
16.1. Contribution of GDP by economic activity, Ghana 266
16.2. Royalties from mining 267
16.3. Trends in manufacturing in Ghana, 1970–1990 267
16.4. Oil production in sub-Saharan Africa, thousand barrels of oil per day 274
17.1. Some socio-economic indices by administrative region, 1970s 282
17.2. Some socio-economic indices by administrative region, 2000s 282
17.3. Stock of houses and annual rate of increase, 1960–2010 283
17.4. Consumption poverty in Ghana from theﬁrst three GLSS surveys 286
17.5. Consumption poverty in Ghana, 1991–1992 to 2005–2006 287
17.6. Poverty in Ghana, 2005–2006 to 2012–2013 288
17.7. Trends in consumption-based inequality in Ghana, 1987–1988
to 2012–2013 289
17.8. Highest educational level: Secondary or higher by region, 1988–2008 292
17.9. Under-ﬁve mortality by region, 1998–2008 293
17.10. Regional distribution of doctors (population per doctor) 295
18.1. Trend and distribution of employment, 1960–2013 300
18.2. Female–male ratio of sex representation (incidence) in employment 306
18.3. Unemployment rates, by age, sex, and location (%) 309
18.4. Underemployment rates by sex and location for aged 15+ (%) 311
19.1. Performance in the Basic Education Certiﬁcate Examination, 2012 (%) 325
19.2. Composition of employment by industry, persons aged 15 years
and above (%) 326
19.3. Employment status of women and men aged 15 years and above (%) 327
xvi List of Tables

19.4. Average time spent on activities by persons aged 18 years and
above (in minutes) 328
19.5. Women’s share of gross household wealth and incidence of ownership of
agricultural land and businesses (%) 329
20.1. Youth school attendance rates by age category and gender, 2000 and 2010
(in percentages) 337
20.2. Employment status of persons aged 15 years and older by locality and
gender, 2012–2013 (in percentages) 338
20.3. Activity rates by age categories and gender, 1960–2010 (in percentages) 339
20.4. Type of work engaged in by currently employed population aged 15 years
and older by locality and gender, 2012–2013 (in percentages) 339
20.5. Economically active population 15+ years by employment sector and sex 342
20.6. Employment status of economically active population by gender, 2010 342
21.1. Educational attainment in Ghana, 2010 350
21.2. Enrolment rates over time 354
21.3. Enrolment rate by gender in Ghana 356
21.4. Other educational statistics, 2005, 2010, and 2014 357
22.1. Ranks for top 25 causes of premature deaths in Ghana, 1990, 2010 367
22.2. Health facilities by type and (public/private) ownership, 2007 372
22.3. Health professionals: population ratio, 2006–2012 374
22.4. Ghana—National expenditure on health, 2000–2013 379
List of Tables xvii

List of Contributors
Charles G. Ackah,University of Ghana
Clement Adamba,University of Ghana
Patricia Woedem Aidam,University of Ghana
A. D. Amarquaye Laryea, University of Ghana*
Ernest Aryeetey,University of Ghana
William Baah-Boateng,University of Ghana
Emmanuel A. Codjoe,University of Ghana
Robert Darko Osei,University of Ghana
Ama de-Graft Aikins,University of Ghana
Fred Mawunyo Dzanku,University of Ghana
Ama Pokuaa Fenny,University of Ghana
Augustin Kwasi Fosu,University of Ghana
Kwabena Gyimah-Brempong,University of South Florida
Abigail Hilson,Royal Holloway University of London
Gavin Hilson,University of Surrey
Ravi Kanbur,Cornell University
Kwadwo Koram,University of Ghana
Andy McKay,University of Sussex
Sam Mensah,University of Ghana
Edward Nketiah-Amponsah,University of Ghana
Franklin Obeng-Odoom,University of Technology Sydney
Abena D. Oduro,University of Ghana
Isaac Osei-Akoto,University of Ghana
Eric Osei-Assibey,University of Ghana
Nkechi S. Owoo,University of Ghana
George Owusu,University of Ghana
Bernice Owusu-Brown,University of Ghana
John Page,Brookings Institution
Peter Quartey,University of Ghana
Bernardin Senadza,University of Ghana
William F. Steel,University of Ghana
Henry Telli,International Growth Centre
* We are sad to record that A. D. Amarquaye Laryea passed away during theﬁnal
stages of the preparation of this volume.

Festus Ebo Turkson,University of Ghana
K. A. Tutu,University of Ghana
Daniel K. Twerefou,University of Ghana
Christopher Udry,Yale University
Paul W. K. Yankson,University of Ghana
xx List of Contributors

Part I
Thematic Issues

1
Ghana at Sixty
Learning from a Developing African Nation’s Past
Ernest Aryeetey and Ravi Kanbur
1.1 INTRODUCTION
Many Ghanaians like to remind themselves and the world that Ghana was the
ﬁrst country in sub-Saharan Africa to be returned to independent status fol-
lowing agitations to break away from colonial rule in many parts of Africa in the
1950s. For many Ghanaians, that achievement signalled tenacity of purpose and
a strong desire to lead the rest of Africa into a new era of transformation and a
better life for all. They took theﬁght for independence seriously considering
that the Gold Coast, as it then was, had a relatively large number of educated
persons and educational institutions compared to many other places in the region
(Wallerstein, 1964).
As Ghanaians celebratedﬁfty-nine years of independence in March 2016, many
newspaper articles expressed doubts about the extent to which expectations at
independence had been met. Most conveyed the perception that the high expect-
ations that accompanied the independence celebrations had not materialized.
1
The people of Ghana had expected rapid industrialization, employment for all,
higher incomes, a more democratic system of governance, greater access to
education and healthcare, and general improvements in welfare. The idea that
these had not been realized to the extent that many had thought was coming, was
quite pervasive as reported by most newspapers covering theﬁfty-ninth inde-
pendence celebrations.
The view that expectations had not been met was presented against a backdrop
of economic uncertainty and weakened economic performance. By the end of
2015 gross domestic product (GDP) growth was at 3.5 per cent for the year. By the
end of March 2016, inﬂation stood at 19.2 per cent and unemployment was
estimated to be more than 6 per cent. A year of very poor power supply had left
1
In the editorial of theDaily Graphicof Monday 8 March 2016, it was noted that‘theﬂame of
national passion has died, and even though the President lighted the symbolicﬂame on 6 March to
symbolize (the) passion that spearheaded national development, that symbolic gesture was probably a
futile attempt to reignite a passion that no longer exists’.

many manufacturing enterprises struggling. It had been estimated that erratic
power supply had cost the small and medium enterprise sector in Ghana an
average of $2.2 million daily or 2 per cent of GDP in 2015 (ISSER, 2015).
The recent economic challenges of Ghana saw it return to the adoption of an
International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme in April 2015 after almost a
decade, when a $900 millionﬁnancing arrangement was put in place. The IMF
noted that‘Ghana, considered one of West Africa’s most stable democracies, until
recently was a model for economic growth. However, the economy has taken a
turn for the worse, with growth down from 8 per cent in 2012 to 3.5 per cent in
2015’(IMF Survey, 2016). At the time the programme was agreed theﬁscal deﬁcit
had been as high as 10.6 per cent of GDP and went down to 6.7 per cent in 2015.
In effect the state of the economy has been quite shaky in the years leading up to
the sixtieth anniversary celebrations of independence, thus feeding into the
widespread perceptions that expectations had not been met.
There is obviously a lot more to consider in determining how the Ghanaian
economy has performed over the post-independence period compared with what
has been seen in the last few years. The irony, however, is that the period of poor
performance in the last few years is not peculiar. The various reviews in this book
will show that there have been several periods of similar poor economic perform-
ance since independence, interspersed with some periods of good performance
and very high expectations. What is also clear is that the periods of poor
performance have almost always been associated with poor economic policies
and weak economic management. By poor economic policies, we mean policies
and actions associated withﬁscal indiscipline and poor budgetary policies often
associated with strong political inﬂuences and considerations. This is in addition
to various structural and institutional bottlenecks that make poor policymaking
and implementation possible.
In this overview chapter, weﬁrst provide a pre-independence account of the
state of the economy and how that economy was managed in section 1.2. It is
followed by a short presentation in section 1.3 of economic policymaking in the
ﬁrst two and a half decades after independence which we call the pre-reform years.
The same process in the reform and post-reform years beginning in 1983 are
discussed in section 1.4. Beginning from section 1.5 we introduce the stories of
each chapter in this volume in relation to how they reﬂect the general theme of
understanding the relationship between economic policymaking and economic
performance.
1.2 FROM GUGGISBERG TO INDEPENDENCE (1919 –1957)
In 1919, when Sir Gordon Guggisberg took ofﬁce as Governor of the Gold Coast,
the colony had experienced twenty years of very high growth due to predomin-
antly high returns from cocoa exports, and this was despite the occurrence of the
First World War. Guggisberg’s ambition was to sustain this growth and prosperity
by channelling the newly-obtained resources into important sections of the
economy such as health, education and other human capital development. His
plan to further develop the infrastructural state of the colony would facilitate
4 Ernest Aryeetey and Ravi Kanbur

production and export activity, which would be expected to bring in more revenue
for increased development of the colony. In 1920, Governor Guggisberg intro-
duced a Ten-Year Development Programme (1920 to 1930), which was aimed at
the transformation of the economy from its sole dependence on cocoa, to other
commodities. By 1920, for example, 83 per cent of the colony’s exports consisted
of cocoa. The programme included plans for the growth and development of the
then-Gold Coast through infrastructural development (Hymer, 1969).
An important aspect of Guggisberg’s development plan was the diversiﬁcation of
the agricultural sector (Hymer, 1969; Agbodeka, 1972). Guggisberg believed that
given the unpredictability of cocoa prices on the world market, it would be safer to
focus on other crops such as rubber. Additionally, there was an attempt to shift
production of cocoa from small-scale farming to large-scale plantations, and ex-
plore the cultivation of other crops such as sisal, rice, coconut, oil palm, among
others. These attempts were however largely unsuccessful given that many of the
alternative crops were not as suited to the climate as cocoa was, and therefore
plantation farming never progressed past the infant entrepreneurial stage. Indeed,
the colonial government’s lack of research and proper understanding of underlying
cultural factors and farming practices in the Gold Coast played a signiﬁcant role in
the unsuccessful outcome of the agricultural policies pursued (Sederberg, 1971).
Plans to develop the transportation network, particularly railway lines and a
harbour, within the country were also met with a number of challenges. First,
Takoradi, in the Western region, was selected as the site for the development of
the national harbour. Although the manganese industry was based in Takoradi,
the returns from this industry were not large enough to justify the situation of the
harbour there. Rather, the eastern part of the country would have beneﬁted more
from the construction of a harbour. Indeed, even after the harbour was completed,
the eastern parts of the country continued to use inefﬁcient and costly means to
bring goods ashore, that is, small surf-boats and head-loading.
2
The introduction
of road networks also reduced the potential contribution of the railway system.
Despite attempts and policies such as the Carriage of Goods Road Ordinance
of 1934 to discourage the use of road networks for the transport of goods, it
continued to be a dominant form of transportation for commodities, given the
moreﬂexible routes of goods transport that roads provided. An unfortunate
consequence of the colonial government’s deliberate attempts to slow down the
expansion of the road network in the Gold Coast was that the development of
regional specialization and exchange of food was inhibited. Additionally, potential
business opportunities in cocoa, transport, and distribution were stemmed. As
mentioned already, the colonial government’s focus on the economy appeared to
be more outward, and therefore the opportunity for the development of trade
within Ghana was missed. It is ironic to note that as the colonial government
persisted in directing the Ghanaian economy outwards, the Great Depression
occurred and the world economy collapsed. The impact on the Ghanaian economy
may have been signiﬁcantly mitigated if trade within the country (e.g. north and
2
The Tema Harbour was constructed in 1962, which provided a more modern means of goods
unloading for the eastern parts of the country.
Learning from a Developing African Nation’s Past 5

south) and between other colonies in the African sub-region had been encouraged
(Hymer, 1969).
Nonetheless, the period of Guggisberg was characterized by some notable
achievements including the Takoradi deep-water port, the Prince of Wales College
(now Achimota School), and the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital built in Accra. Despite
all his efforts, Guggisberg failed to propel the economy forward at the scale that
he envisioned, as a result of internal and external factors. The value of exports fell
from £11.7 million in 1927 to £4.0 in 1934 as a result of the Great Depression and
by 1940, import prices had risen. New industries did not spring up, as Guggisberg
had hoped as a result of declining state revenues, and by the late 1920s, the
development plan had to be aborted.
The Great Depression had exposed some of the weaknesses of policies pursued
in the Gold Coast. For instance, foreign investment proved to be an ineffective
means of driving the economy forward and the volatility of the international
economy did not provide a strong foundation on which to build the Ghanaian
economy; the main contribution to the colony came from the cocoa farmers, who
had received little assistance from the colonial government; there was little
diversiﬁcation from the production of primary products into manufacturing or
large scale modern farming; among others. After the depression, the British
government embarked on a large-scale effort to expand social and community
services such as health, education, and urbanization. Additionally, some invest-
ments were made in infrastructural expansion in order to provide support services
for the private sector. This was all to be accomplished under the terms of the
Ten-Year Development plan of 1946. Due to the insufﬁciency of funds allocated
to this plan, another development plan was introduced in 1950. This was the
Ten-Year Plan for the Economic and Social Development of the Gold Coast
(1950–60). The plan was later collapsed into a Five-Year plan (1951–2to1956–7)
and saw the establishment of the Volta Valley scheme, aluminium smelter and the
Industrial Development Corporation, which was formed to provide loans to small
industrial entrepreneurs and also establish industrial estates (NDPC, 2012).
1.3 ECONOMIC POLICYMAKING IN THE EARLY
POST-INDEPENDENCE YEARS (1957 –1983)
At the time of independence, the government had about 250 million pounds at
its disposal, and the newly elected government continued with the agenda of
infrastructural expansion and the provision of basic services that had been started
in the period before independence. The second Five-Year Development Plan
(1959–64) was introduced in 1958, which included plans for the development
of a hydroelectric plant. A system of socialism was proposed and adopted, where
government would assume direct participation in industry, with efforts comple-
mented by the foreign sector. By 1961 however, this plan was replaced with a more
comprehensive Seven Year Development Plan for National Reconstruction and
Development (1963–4 to 1969–70). The main tenets of the plan included the
modernization of agriculture and rapid expansion of industrial activity in Ghana.
6 Ernest Aryeetey and Ravi Kanbur

Additionally, the direction of trade was re-focused away from Great Britain and
more towards other socialist countries (Hymer, 1969).
Despite the comprehensive and encompassing nature of the Seven-Year Plan,
there were many challenges faced in its implementation. First, the world market
price of cocoa plunged in 1961. This presented a challenge because proceeds from
cocoa exports had been intended toﬁnance the plan. By 1965, the price of cocoa
had fallen to £87.10 per ton, substantially lower than the £200 that had been
assumed, leading to a substantial drop in foreign exchange earnings. Additionally,
the price of capital and other manufactured goods and equipment that would have
been needed for the planned industrial and agricultural projects under the Plan
rose signiﬁcantly; between 1950 and 1961, prices had risen by over 25 per cent.
Additionally, there were some criticisms of the socialist approach adopted by the
State. It was argued that these policies frustrated the private sector, which may
have been able to contribute more to the economy if given the opportunity, and
also discouraged foreign capital (Opoku, 2014).
In the face of declining export revenues and in an attempt to raise the needed
funds for the successful implementation of the Seven-Year Plan, the government
increased taxes, increased its borrowing from abroad and also imposed import
controls. Import controls led to a situation of shortages and signiﬁcant price hikes,
leading the government to respond by way of price controls. These attempts met
with signiﬁcant resistance from all sectors of the economy. Indeed, black markets
soon developed and corruption also spread.
It is argued that some developmental projects undertaken in the immediate
post-independence era were less motivated by sound economic reasoning than by
political interests of the ruling government. It is important to note that although
Nkrumah, in the post-independence era, embraced socialism and a strong sense
of nationalism, he was also perceived to have demonstrated a certain antipathy
towards the possibility of an indigenous business class, for fear of possible political
opposition (Killick, 2010). Indeed, it appears that foreign investors were preferred
to local business men. There are other noted instances where political interest
appears to have overshadowed economic rationalization. The Volta project is one
such example. Nkrumah saw this as essential to the realization of his development
goals. Indeed, while the Volta project would create a signiﬁcant power supply to
drive industries and speed up the industrialization process, it is argued that there
were few sound economic arguments put forward for the industrialization agenda.
It would appear however that this particular investment is generally seen to have
been a great one that has inﬂuenced much of Ghana’s subsequent development.
It has provided most of the energy that has sustained the economy forﬁve decades.
Although the dominant rationale for industrialization was a reduction in un-
employment rates, this did not present a problem in the early 1960s. Although
the Seven Year development plan emphasized an expansion in education and skilled
manpower, these were desired for their own sake, and not necessarily as signiﬁcant
inputs into the industrialization process.
After the overthrow of the post-independence government, the period between
1966 and 1980 saw the proliferation of a number of short-term development
plans, whose successful implementation was often undermined by frequent
changes in government and attendant political turmoil. There were notable
policies like Operation Feed Yourself and Operation Feed Your Industries,
Learning from a Developing African Nation’s Past 7

which attempted to promote the ideology of Ghanaian self-reliance. These saw
signiﬁcant improvements in agricultural production. By the early 1980s however,
the economy was in dire circumstances—there was excess and unutilized indus-
trial capacity, high inﬂation rates (i.e. had reached 123 per cent by 1983) and
commodity shortages. The government of Ghana (the Provisional National
Defence Council), in response to the poor state of the economy, adopted the
IMF/World Bank-funded Economic Recovery Programme (ERP) with the goal of
stabilizing the macro-economy and laying a solid foundation for more sustainable
development.
1.4 ECONOMIC POLICYMAKING AFTER ECONOMIC
REFORMS (1984 TO DATE)
The ERP was introduced in Ghana in 1983. Reform objectives included a shift
towards market-based prices and exchange rates and noticeableﬁscal discipline.
The over-valued cedi was also devalued and input and producer markets were
liberalized. The rehabilitation of the country’s deteriorated ports, roads and rail-
ways was given priority early in the programme. Indeed, soon after the adoption
of the ERP, positive growth rates were observed in the economy. Between 1983 and
1986, macroeconomic reforms had lowered inﬂation by 90 percentage points to
33 per cent. Traditional exports improved signiﬁcantly as producers responded
to higher producer prices and the removal of marketing impediments. Addition-
ally, poverty and inequality were reduced over the reform period. For instance,
the incidence of extreme poverty declined from 36 per cent of the population
at the beginning of the 1990s to 29 per cent at the end of the decade, although
theseﬁgures varied across regions. In Accra, more signiﬁcant reductions were
observed, compared with the north. Income distribution also improved within
the period—the Gini coefﬁcient decreased from 35.9 in 1988 to 32.7 ten years
later in 1998 (Tsikata, 2000).
By the middle of the 1990s it was obvious that the economy, which was heavily
dependent on aid, was beginning to lose steam and needed reorientation
(Aryeetey and Tarp, 2000). It was not surprising that policymakers began to
consider policymaking and development with a medium to longer term frame-
work. The Ministry of Financeﬁrst put together a Medium-Term Expenditure
Framework (MTEF) to consider expenditures within a three-year period. Discus-
sions to set up a state organization to oversee and facilitate the planning process
began in the 1980s and by 1994, under Act 479, the National Development
Planning Commission (NDPC) was established. In 1995, the ruling government
presented the Ghana-Vision 2020 (The First Step: 1996–2000), which aimed at the
transformation of the country to middle-income status in twenty-ﬁve years. In
2001 however, the change in government led to a cancellation of Vision 2020.
Rather, this plan was replaced with the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy
I (2002–5), which focused on poverty-related spending and redistributive pol-
icies, and Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategy II (2006–9), which focused on
growth as a primary path to poverty reduction and eventually poverty eradication.
8 Ernest Aryeetey and Ravi Kanbur

With the change in government in 2009, the Ghana Shared Growth and
Development Agenda (GSGDA I): 2010–13 was the main development frame-
work employed, and was followed by the Ghana Shared Growth and Development
Agenda (GSGDA II): 2014–17. These plans have emphasized the need for shared
and inclusive growth, and not simply high growth rates. This would be a more
realistic means of reducing poverty.
1.5 MOVING FROM POLICIES TO ACTION
As seen from the earlier sections, Ghana has, since independence in 1957,
attempted several different approaches at economic policymaking aimed at
rapid development and growth underpinned by different political tendencies.
The state has often been given a major role backed by institutions that were
government led and critically involved in all sectors of the economy. Public
institutions have often played the role of market coordinator, allocating resources
and touting the common good. The earlier policies of controls led to an increas-
ingly distorted economy with economic performance plummeting. Although
controls were removed through subsequent economic recovery programmes, the
challenges have remained. It has been difﬁcult to ensure macroeconomic stability
and to move development plans into actionable and practical responses to current
societal needs.
Although the role of the state in Ghana has been redeﬁned to create institutions
which are effective and relevant in the development of the nation, economic
growth continues through a set of loops. The experience is that in one instance,
economic growth shoots up and the next it plummets. The factors that inﬂuence
the cyclical movement vary from year to year even if sometimes under the same
governmental structures. Moving from economic policies to tangible outputs that
are the result of effective implementation of state polices requires that institutions
are strengthened. The experience has been that Ghana has often been quick to
formulate new policies in reaction to crises, be theyﬁscal, monetary or external,
and yet the history of the political economy points to many failed attempts to
prioritize the implementation of these policies. Structural transformation has been
on the agenda in Ghana and in other African countries for decades, and yet no
credible strategy for it has been formulated.
So how can institutional reform bring about development in Ghana? Which
policies and institutions are the right ones? Ghana has committed to poverty
reduction under various governments in the last six decades and yet increasingly
progress has not always been consistent. An understanding of which institutions
and which policies are best is particularly important to create better synergies
across all sectors of the economy. The justiﬁcation for institutional reforms comes
from the suggestion by Fosu and Aryeetey (2008) that institutional reforms should
be accompanied with a commensurate amount of capital to build the capacity of
institutions which remain too weak to adequately address the constraints within
the economy.
Since the mid-2000s, Ghana has slipped down the corruption ladder with
glaring institutional weaknesses and lapses. These factors not only slow down
Learning from a Developing African Nation’s Past 9

the performance of institutions but also weaken public faith in them. Perhaps, the
state’s role in ensuring economic growth and stability needs to be reconsidered in
the light of the many challenges it faces. Killick (2010) and others have argued that
the country stands to gain more if it limited the role of the state. For instance, he
cites the weaknesses of public institutions to implement key economic reforms
and manage various sectors of the economy. He has maintained strengthening the
capacity of public services will be catalytic to transforming key structures within
the economy.
Embarking on comprehensive reforms will require well-resourced government
agencies to establish efﬁcient and effective management systems. Despite the
tremendous effort and signiﬁcant resources allocated to reforms, limited progress
has been made in this regard. Effective health services, education, and housing
remain out of reach for many people. This volume draws on Ghana’s growth and
development experience from independence to the present period. It examines
policies adopted by various governments to improve both the micro- and macro-
economy, and assesses the degrees of success of various policies and programmes.
Although Ghana’s performance at the time of independence was noteworthy,
there have been numerous challenges encountered in the journey to sustainable
development. The volume details these and makes suggestions for getting the
country back on track towards achieving goals set out at the time of the country’s
independence. The volume also offers explanations for the difﬁcult development
path that Ghana has been on. Essentially, each chapter presents policies and their
outcomes, with explanations for those. The basic conclusion is generally that the
policies may sometimes not be the rightﬁt to the Ghana situation or that there
have been several implementation challenges that are often of a political nature.
Theﬁrst part of the book provides an overview of the Ghanaian economy.
Chapter 2 begins with an in-depth discussion of the historical connection between
the noted Development Economist, Arthur Lewis, and the evolution of Ghana’s
early economic policies. It highlights some of the inherent disagreements that
exist between economists and politicians in decisions regarding the operation of
the economy. Kanbur draws out the deep connections between Lewis’thinking
and the evolution of Ghanaian economic policy. The chapter reﬂects on his life
through the economics of the Gold Coast to his period as economic adviser to
Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’sﬁrst Prime Minister. Kanbur notes that at a later stage
in his career Lewis began a new path of thinking where he linked politics and
economic policymaking, breaking new grounds for political economy ideologies
that followed soon after. Chapter 3 examines the nexus between property and
freedom in Ghana. Obeng-Odoom looks at what‘property’means under the
different political eras. He argues that since 1966 both the idea and the practice
of property have undergone a great transformation. Property has been given a new
identity that lends itself to a symbol of economic power. The author suggests a
return to the pre-colonial commons, given its conduciveness to social, economic,
and ecological well-being.
Part II of the book focuses on macroeconomy andﬁnance. Ghana’s economy
was expected to slow down for the fourth consecutive year to an estimated
3.9 per cent growth rate in 2015, owing to a severe energy crisis, unsustainable
domestic and external debt burden, and severely deteriorated macroeconomic and
ﬁnancial imbalances. Chapter 4 by Aryeetey and Fenny looks back at growth
10 Ernest Aryeetey and Ravi Kanbur

trends in four distinct political eras and draws out the various challenges and
lessons learned covering theﬁscal, monetary and exchange rate systems and the
various productive sectors in the period. Over-spending on a variety of develop-
ment initiatives without moves to create a strong and reliable public revenue base
has resulted in an ever-present budget deﬁcit which has been consistently funded
by domestic and international loans. Given that macroeconomic policies have failed
to produce consistent growth, the authors suggest that it is expedient to pay close
attention not only to restoringﬁscal balance but also promoting structural reforms
with solid institutions in a consistent manner.
Chapter 5 presents a discussion of the outcomes ofﬁscal policy from Ghana’s
independence to date. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview ofﬁscal
policies, outcomes and slippages in Ghana over the last sixty years and examines the
relationship betweenﬁscal policies and economic growth in Ghana over the period.
Osei and Telli note that in 1957, when Ghana became an independent nation,ﬁscal
policy was nothing more than using government’s available resources to increase
spending and provide the needed infrastructure and industrial base for rapid
development. This, they argue was the beginning of an overly expansionaryﬁscal
policy, which has currently resulted in macroeconomic challenges for the country.
Government spending remains difﬁcult to control in present times coupled with
the difﬁculty to increase revenue mobilization through an efﬁcient tax system and
tax administration; especially within the informal sector in Ghana.
Chapter 6 by Quartey, Owusu-Brown, and Turkson discusses monetary policy
and inﬂation management in Ghana, with a focus on inﬂation targeting in Ghana
and observed outcomes. They argue that there has been signiﬁcant consensus
from both theoretical and empirical literature on the extent to which monetary
policy can signiﬁcantly alter the course of real economic activity both in the short
and long term; though in the long term the impact of increase in excess money
supply is only creation. Over the period 1954–2014, monetary authorities in
Ghana pursued various monetary policy strategies from exchange-rate targeting
to monetary targeting (both targeting price level and/or an explicit goal) and to
inﬂation targeting. What is important is that inﬂation targeting yields growth and
stimulates job creation.
Chapter 7 by Laryea and Senadza is on trade and exchange rate policies.
3
It
begins with a look at the theoretical underpinnings of trade and exchange rate
policy and the recommendations based on the theory and empirical studies. They
critically look at the results of past trade reforms and provide a critique of the
policies pursued. Although many countries have been able to improve their
developmental status, the authors argue that Ghana, unlike the Asian tigers has
had a weak external sector, due partly to the inability of local industries to
compete. The chapter mentions a number of challenges with exchange rate and
trade controls, and makes suggestions towards mitigating the problem.
Chapter 8 by Mensah reviews the evolution of Ghana’sﬁnancial sector (with
speciﬁc reference to banking and capital markets). Mensah argues that the while
some policy reforms in the sector were successful in addressing the challenges of
3
Unfortunately our colleague Dr Albert Amarquaye Laryea died in April 2016. We acknowledge his
signiﬁcant contribution to this volume.
Learning from a Developing African Nation’s Past 11

the times, other reform efforts did not achieve their objectives because of poor
design and an unfavourable operating environment. Critical policy and regulatory
choices need to be made to address the high cost ofﬁnancial intermediation.
Ghana’s new oil economy is discussed in Chapter 9 by Fosu. He examines the
extent to which the economy might now be subject to a signiﬁcant risk of the‘oil
curse’that seems to have inﬂicted many oil economies around the world. The
chapter assesses the historical importance of oil in the Ghanaian economy and
provides an assessment of how the oil resource has inﬂuenced the general
economy and the respective local environments. Fosu is optimistic that if the
institutions put in place to regulate the industry are well-resourced, Ghana could
avoid the‘oil curse’. The key is to uphold the promotion of transparency; which
appears to be holding well and accountability which seems to be of some concern
in recent times.
Part III of the book focuses on sectoral perspectives covering agriculture,
industry, mining, infrastructure, and other sectors. It includes aﬁnal discussion
on the environment. Chapter 10 by Dzanku and Udry highlights the contribution
of the agricultural sector to Ghana’s economy, and also highlights the importance
and success of various agricultural policies in achieving sustainable development
in the Ghanaian economy. Owoo and Page discuss industrial policy in Chapter 11,
providing a history of industrial policy and contributions to the Ghanaian econ-
omy. They emphasize the need for complementary efforts between private busi-
nesses and the state in achieving sustainable growth. The chapter also discusses
the potential for industrial policy within an oil economy.
Steel shows in Chapter 12 that the expansion of the informal sector in the past
sixty years is the result of economic reforms that have shrunk an otherwise huge
public sector and a weak manufacturing base leading to rapidly rising informal-
ity. Steel shows how employment in different sectors of the economy has evolved
in the context of policies and growth patterns and explains the persistence of
informality even in a liberalized, growing economy. After several years of
reforms, it is still unlikely that the public and private formal sector will be able
to absorb the increasing numbers of unemployed. The role of the informal sector
cannot be dismissed. It requires a clear policy direction to ensure employment
growth however.
Owusu and Yankson look at the dynamics of urbanization in Ghana since
independence in Chapter 13. They pay particular attention to the demographic,
economic and environmental dynamics of the process and show that the period
1984–2010 saw a rapid concentration of the population in cities and towns with
the urban population multiplying by about 3.5 times. This has implication for
policy and the authors note that poor planning and management of cities have led
to growing incidence of slums and poor housing and over-stretched infrastructure
and basic services. Ghana’s future will remain urban but very little seems to be
done on planning for this urbanizing population.
Chapter 14 examines the state of infrastructure in Ghana and its implications for
economic development. The authors, Nketiah-Amponsah and Aidam, argue that a
country’s growth is strongly correlated with its level of infrastructure development,
and recommend the prioritization of infrastructure such as roads, railways, and
energy in order to maintain Ghana’s middle-income status. Chapter 15 discusses
the management of the environment, as a major factor for sustainable development,
12 Ernest Aryeetey and Ravi Kanbur

with a focus on the institutional framework for environmental management.
Twerefou and Tutu note that the growth of Ghana’s economy has largely been
driven by the exploitation of its natural resource—gold, cocoa, forests, and, more
recently, oil and gas. They argue that the over-dependence on natural resources for
economic growth and development since independence within a weak policy and
regulatory framework has led to the over exploitation of many of these resources
and the deterioration of the environment to the extent that the sustainable man-
agement for posterity remains a challenge. They pose the question of how Ghana
can effectively integrate strategies and policies across all relevant sectors in order to
halt the deterioration of the environment.
Writing on mining in Ghana (Chapter 16), Gavin and Abigail Hilson argue that
mining produces signiﬁcant quantities of minerals, including gold, for example,
but there is a major disconnect between mining and other areas of the economy.
The chapter chronicles the rise of mining enclaves, explaining how policy has
nurtured their growth. The chapter concludes by reﬂecting critically on the future
of Ghana’s mining sector, highlighting the need to put more emphasis on strength-
ening institutions responsible for overseeing management of mining revenues.
Ghana’s unusually high GDP growth of 15.0 per cent in 2011 was mainly the result
of oil production; the non-oil growth rate was 9.4 per cent.
Part IV of the volume discusses human development in general. McKay and
Osei-Assibey explore in Chapter 17 the changes that have taken place in Ghana
in the area of poverty and inequality. Their discussion of poverty in Ghana in the
ﬁrst thirty years after independence is hampered by the dearth of data, but they
show clearly that there has been a signiﬁcant change in terms of both monetary
poverty and inequality in the last thirty years, which allowed Ghana to meet the
Millennium Development Goal target on poverty reduction ahead of time. They
note that even though poverty has come down signiﬁcantly there were signiﬁ-
cant variations across regions, especially between the north and south and this is
attributed to policy lapses.
In Chapter 18, Baah-Boateng examines trends and the changing structure of
employment and unemployment in Ghana since 1960. He delves into employ-
ment related policies pursued over the years relating its impact in the various
sectors in the economy. He argues that structural change needed to transform the
agriculture sector into a viable employer of people in Ghana failed, drawing out
people from the sector into services sector. Unfortunately, the services sector has
been unable to absorb such huge numbers of the unemployed. He notes the high
unemployment rates among the educated which require political attention.
Oduro and Ackah examine in Chapter 19 the presence of gender gaps in
various dimensions in Ghana and laws that have been laid down to reduce the
unevenness in gender relations. They discuss the progress made in achieving
the goal of reducing gender gaps in education, employment, time use and asset
ownership in Ghana. The enormity of the gender gap is yet to be addressed
although some progress has been made, particularly in the formulation of policies
in reducing gender gaps along several dimensions. The clear understanding about
gender relations is needed in order to implement appropriate strategies to close
the gender gap.
In Chapter 20, Codjoe highlights the historical presence of an expansive youth-
ful population in Ghana in recent years, and presents challenges experienced in
Learning from a Developing African Nation’s Past 13

harnessing the potential advantages of this youth bulge through sustainable
investments in health, education, and job creation. He suggests that different
approaches will be required to achieve greater and effective participation of the
youth in the national development process. Increasingly, he notes the govern-
ments’expanding role in providing targeted youth employment programmes with
very little success. But while the policy space is dominated by governments, others
like non-governmental organizations (NGOs) need to be strengthened to provide
employment for the youth.
Gyimah-Brempong suggests in Chapter 21 that education seems to be a major
answer to addressing the unemployment problem in Ghana. He discusses the
evolution and growth of education at all levels, access to education, quality,
relevance, and the prospects of reforms, with speciﬁc reference to the post-colonial
period. There is yet another call for an overhaul of the Ghanaian educational
system which needs to be radically reformed to improve efﬁciency and to make it
relevant to meet the development needs of the country.
Aikins and Koram examine health and health care in Ghana from 1957 to date
in Chapter 22. The chapter discusses changes in health status over the six decades
after independence, and the responsiveness of health systems to these changes.
The vision of the Government in instituting a health insurance scheme to ensure
equitable access for all residents of Ghana to provide an acceptable quality
package of essential healthcare has been lauded by many other countries. Indeed,
for theﬁrst time, this policy has not been quickly discarded, as others have been
under different ruling parties. Yet its implementation has been fraught with
difﬁculties. Continuing with the theme of health insurance, Osei-Akoto and
Adamba observe in Chapter 23 that a general reappraisal of the National Health
Insurance Scheme (NHIS)ﬁnancing is needed, in particular, in an era of eco-
nomic challenges without losing the basic values of social insurance.
REFERENCES
Agbodeka, F. (1972).‘Sir Gordon Guggisberg’s Contribution to the Development of the
Gold Coast, 1919–1927’.Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, 13(1): 51–64.
Aryeetey, E. and F. Tarp (2000).‘Structural Adjustment and After: Which Way Forward?’,
inEconomic Reforms in Ghana, the Miracle and the Mirage, ed. E. Aryeetey, J. Harrigan,
and M. Nissanke. Oxford: James Currey.
Fosu, A. K. and E. Aryeetey (2008).‘Ghana’s Post-Independence Economic Growth:
1960–2000’,inThe Economy of Ghana—Analytical Perspectives on Stability, Growth
and Poverty, ed. E. Aryeetey and R. Kanbur. Woodbridge: James Currey.
Hymer, S. (1969).‘The Political Economy of the Gold Coast and Ghana’. Economic Growth
Center, Centre Discussion Paper No. 73.
IMF Survey (2016).‘Ghana: The Bumpy Road to Recovery’. IMF News Article, January,
Washington, DC.
ISSER (2015).State of the Ghanaian Economy Report 2014. Institute of Statistical, Social
and Economic Research, University of Ghana, Legon.
Killick, T. (2010).Development Economics in Action: A Study of Economic Policies in Ghana
(2nd edn). Routledge Studies in Development Economics. Oxford: Routledge.
National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) (2012).‘The History of Develop-
ment Planning in Ghana’. Mimeo, Accra.
14 Ernest Aryeetey and Ravi Kanbur

Opoku, D. K. (2014).The Politics of Government-Business Relations in Ghana, 1982–2008.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sederberg, P. C. (1971).‘The Gold Coast under Colonial Rule: An Expenditure Analysis’.
African Studies Review, 14(2): 179–204.
Tsikata, Y. (2000).‘Globalization, Poverty and Inequality in sub-Saharan Africa: A Political
Economy Appraisal’. Paper prepared for the OECD Dialogue on Poverty and Inequality,
30 November–1 December, Paris.
Wallerstein, I. M. (1964).The Road to Independence: Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Paris:
Mouton.
Learning from a Developing African Nation’s Past 15

2
W. Arthur Lewis and the Roots of
Ghanaian Economic Policy
Ravi Kanbur
2.1 INTRODUCTION
All those who know Ghana know about the association of Nobel Laureate
W. Arthur Lewis with the country’s economic policymaking before independence
and in its early years as a free nation. But there is less appreciation in development
economics more generally of the central role that Ghana played in Lewis’s
thinking as a development economist, and there is less appreciation among
Ghanaians of how the Ghana experience left an indelible mark on Lewis in the
second half of his career. In this sixtieth year of Ghana’s independence, this
chapter attempts to set out the deep connections between this giant of develop-
ment economics and the evolution of Ghanaian economic policy.
The plan of the chapter is as follows. Section 2.2 begins at the beginning and
gives a very brief biographical account of Arthur Lewis’s life before he became
involved with the economics of the Gold Coast colony, as it was at the time. It then
follows through and presents and assesses Lewis’s work on the Gold Coast in light
of the development of his economic thinking to that time. Section 2.3 takes up his
intense interaction with Ghana during his period as economic adviser to Kwame
Nkrumah, Ghana’sﬁrst Prime Minister and, in particular, how Lewis balanced his
interventionist and market oriented instincts as an economist. Section 2.4 follows
through on how this period affected Lewis’s post Ghana thinking and work in
what was the second half of his career as development economist, especially on the
links between politics and economic policymaking.
2.2 BEFORE GHANA: THE DECOLONIZATION IMPERATIVE
This section brieﬂy lays out the life and the development of Arthur Lewis’s
thinking before Ghana. By‘before Ghana’I mean before Ghanaian independence
in March 1957, and before Arthur Lewis arrived in Ghana as the Government’s
Chief Economic Adviser later that year. However, as we shall see, this was not
Lewis’sﬁrst contact with Ghana. He had developed an intimate knowledge of the

Gold Coast colony in the years prior to 1957, and indeed that interaction was itself
instrumental in his evolution as an economist.
W. Arthur Lewis was born in the British West Indies in 1915, four years before
Guggisberg was appointed Governor General of the Gold Coast Colony, and four
decades before Ghana became independent. A distance of more than 5,000 miles
separated his birth place from the country he would become intimately associated
with, but in a sense Arthur Lewis’s career trajectory was very likely to cross that
of a colony in which an independence struggle was being sparked at the time of
his birth.
A brilliant student in his home island of St Lucia, Lewis won a scholarship
to study at the London School of Economics and arrived in England in 1933, at
the age of 18, graduating withﬁrst class honors in 1937. The comprehensive
and excellent biography of Lewis by Tignor (2006), on which I shall draw liberally
for this chapter, sets out the success that Lewis enjoyed at the London School
of Economics (LSE). His undergraduate adviser sent this recommendation for
Lewis’s admission to the Ph.D programme:‘May I say deliberately and with
emphasis that Lewis is the most brilliant of all graduates whose work I have
seen since I returned to the school. He is already a mature, independent, and
original thinker with a quite exceptional literary capacity.’
1
And yet Lewis’s path was not entirely smooth. Even at the LSE, an institution
founded by Fabian socialists, he faced the racism which he also met in the streets
of London. When he was considered for a temporary one-year appointment at the
LSE in 1938, the Director of the LSE wrote to the Board of Governors as follows:
‘The appointments committee is, as I said, quite unanimous but recognize that
the appointment of a coloured man may possibly be open to some criticism.
Normally, such appointments do not require conﬁrmation of the Governors
but on this occasion I said that I should before taking action submit the matter to
you.’
2
Lewis became involved with the burgeoning decolonization movement in
Britain, and consorted with the likes of C. L. R James, George Padmore, Eric
Williams, and Paul Robeson. His views at that time are captured by a review he
did of Margery Perham’sAfricans and British Rulein 1941:‘To Miss Perham it is
from his own savagery that the African needs protection; white exploitation is seen
merely as the inevitable if unfortunate accompaniment of the effort to civilize him.’
3
The connection between colonial views and racism continued into Lewis’s early
career. Tignor (2006: 37) recounts the story of how, despite his by then brilliant
academic qualiﬁcations, his appointment to a Chair at Liverpool was blocked for
reasons of‘other considerations than high academic standing’.
4
Finally, however, he
did get his Chair, the Stanley Jevons Chair at the University of Manchester in 1948.
But by this time Lewis had already begun his interaction with the policy world of
economic development through his work with the Colonial Ofﬁce.
The 1930s and 1940s were a period of ferment not just on the decolonization
front. Economic policy in general was under discussion and dispute. From Cam-
bridge, John Maynard Keynes had excited a generation of students with his critiques
of‘the Treasury View’in the face of massive and persistent unemployment. His
1
Tignor (2006: 17).
2
Tignor (2006: 21).
3
Tignor (2006: 36).
4
Tignor (2006: 38).
W. Arthur Lewis and Ghanaian Economic Policy 17

skepticism about market mechanisms found its counter in, of all places, the London
School of Economics, under the auspices of economists such as Lionel Robbins
and Friedrich Hayek. Lewis reacted against the laissez-faire liberal policy stances of
his own institution, and was not only more Keynesian in macroeconomic matters,
but also more interventionist in microeconomic and structural policy. This set
him against Sydney Caine, an inﬂuential ofﬁcial in the Colonial Ofﬁce, in the
work of the Colonial Economic Advisory Committee, on which Lewis served.
Here is how Lewis described Caine:‘he is a religious devotee of laissez-faire, and
his headship of the Economic Department at this juncture is fatal....[his approach]
is fatal not only in the decisions he makes, especially on secondary industry, on
marketing and on co-operative organisation, but also in the appointments he
recommends to important jobs in the Colonies, for which he chooses almost
invariably people as laissez-faire as himself’.
5
This counter to laissez-faire, which Lewis saw himself as providing, and which
he saw as being a key element in the debate on post-colonial economic policy, is
seen in a number of his publications of the time (Lewis, 1939, 1944, 1949). But so
far as Ghana, or rather the Gold Coast, is concerned his views of the time were
crystallized in Lewis (1953). In 1951 the Convention People’s Party (CPP) led by
Kwame Nkrumah won a sweeping victory in the elections and in 1952 Lewis was
invited by Nkrumah and the CPP leadership to advise the Gold Coast government
and to write a report on industrialization. Lewis’s transmittal letter on the report,
written to Minister of Commerce and Industry K. A. Gbedemah and dated 5 June
1953, notes the details of the assignment:
I have the honour to transmit herewith my Report on industrialization and economic
policy, which I was commissioned to write by letter No. MCI/C,16/SF.3/18 from your
Ministry, dated November 29, 1952. I visited the Gold Coast from December 15
th
,
1952, to January 4
th
, 1953, and travelled extensively in the country, covering about
1,800 miles by road and by air. I had the opportunity of visiting many industrial
establishments, and I discussed the subject with as many persons as possible in the
time available. (Lewis, 1953: i)
Thus Lewis was in Ghana for less than three weeks for hisﬁrst visit, and
produced his report in the space ofﬁve months. Although his report does contain
much in the way of detail on speciﬁc industries, garnered presumably from existing
reports, its thrust rather is from an underlying conceptual framework which Lewis
had been developing over the previous decade and a half. However, the analysis and
conclusion might appear somewhat surprising to some who expected him to
support subsidized industrialization, and is worth quoting in some detail as one
of the veryﬁrst examples of analytical input to Ghanaian economic policymaking
(the paragraph numbers refer to the paragraph numbers of the report):
1. Industrialization starts usually in one of three ways: (i) with the processing
for export of primary products (agricultural and mineral) which were previ-
ously exported in a crude state; or (2) with manufacturing for an expanding
home market; or (3) with the manufacture for export of light manufactures,
often based on imported raw materials...
5
Mine (2006: 335).
18 Ravi Kanbur

20. In unenlightened circles agriculture and industry are often considered as
alternatives to each other. The truth is that industrialization for a home market
can make little progress unless agriculture is progressing vigorously at the same
time, to provide both the market for industry, and industry’s labour supply. If
agriculture is stagnant, industry cannot grow...
252. Measures to increase manufacture of commodities for the home market
deserve support, but are not of number one priority. A small programme is
justiﬁed, but a major programme in this sphere should wait until the country is
better prepared to carry it. The main obstacle is the fact that agricultural
productivity per man is stagnant...
253. Number one priority is therefore a concentrated attack on the system of
growing food in the Gold Coast, so as to set in motion an ever increasing
productivity...
254. Priority number two is to improve the public services. To do this will
reduce the cost of manufacturing in the Gold Coast, and will thus automatically
attract new industries, without the government having to offer very special
favours...
255. Very many years will have elapsed before it becomes economical for the
government to transfer any large part of its resources towards industrialization,
and away from the urgent priorities of agricultural productivity and the public
services. Meanwhile,...it should support industries which can be established
without large or continuing subsidies, and whose proprietors are willing to train
and employ Africans in senior posts. Because industrialisation is a cumulative
process (the more industries you already have, the more new industries you
attract), it takes time to lay the foundations of industrialisation, and it would be
wrong to postpone the establishment of any industry which couldﬂourish after
a short teething period. Chapter II has suggested enough of these for a moderate
programme.
This line of economic argument turns out to be quintessentially Lewis—not
dogmatically anti-market, but well aware of market failures, and developing the
argument for intervention with great awareness of local circumstances. From his
strong views on race and decolonization, and from his tussles with Sydney Caine
at the Colonial Ofﬁce, one might have expected a much more interventionist
stance on industrialization. But, in effect, Lewisﬁrst identiﬁed the nature of
market failure and then fashioned a response accordingly.
At the very time that Lewis was working on this report on industrialization in
the Gold Coast he was fashioning his Nobel Prize-winning argument on‘surplus
labor’which he argued was the state of affairs in the West Indies, in Egypt, and in
India. In these situations, the main break on development was inadequate invest-
ment in manufacturing, and once this got going the‘unlimited supplies of labor’
from the agricultural sector would keep wages down sufﬁciently so as to not stall
industrialization. To quote a famous passage from his Nobel Prize-winning paper:
So far we have merely been setting the stage. Now the play begins. For we can now
begin to trace the process of economic expansion. The key to the process is the use
which is made of the capitalist surplus. In so far as this is reinvested in creating new
capital, the capitalist sector expands, taking more people into capitalist employment
W. Arthur Lewis and Ghanaian Economic Policy 19

out of the subsistence sector. The surplus is then larger still, capital formation is still
greater, and so the process continues until the surplus labour disappears.
(Lewis, 1954: 151–2)
6
And to the extent that this investment was held back by market failures in the
manufacturing sector, the government should intervene to address them. In such
situations, that would be priority number one.
However, Lewis’s point was that the Gold Coast, unlike India, did not present a
situation of surplus labour. Rather, it was one of labour shortage given the large
amount of land available in agriculture. In this situation the way of releasing labour
for manufacturing without pushing up wages so much that investment would be
choked off, was to increase agricultural productivity. In labour shortage econ-
omies, that would be priority number one. Not that support for industrialization
would be absent—the last page of the Lewis report has 11 such recommendations,
including, for example,‘purchase land, outside Kumasi and Accra, for develop-
ment as industrial estates’,‘promote and aid the establishment of aﬁrst class hotel
in Accra’,and‘increase the staff of the Industrial Development Corporation’. But,
these would be relatively minor interventions compared to‘priority number one’
(agricultural productivity) and‘priority number two’(improving public services).
These conclusions of Lewis the economist came as a surprise to the Colonial
Ofﬁce, who had expected a more radical support of industrialization. They may
also have come as a surprise to the stalwarts of CPP, who had imbibed a more
directed state socialism in their anti-colonial struggles. But the CPP leadership did
not disavow the report and the government accepted it in the legislative assembly
in 1954, as did the opposition. Perhaps the major attention of the government and
the polity was elsewhere, with all eyes on the build up to full independence. The
Gold Coast Industrialization report revealed the balance of Arthur Lewis the
economist. But the government’s acceptance of it did not reveal, or rather it
papered over, real tensions in economic policy and strategy, and these were to
boil over during Lewis’s next major interaction with Ghana, as resident economic
adviser to theﬁrst government of an independent Ghana.
2.3 GHANA: THE BALANCE OF ECONOMICS
Arthur Lewis was present in Accra for the celebrations when the Gold Coast
became Ghana on 6 March 1957. But he was to return in October of 1957 for a
fateful stint as the government’s chief economic adviser, at the invitation of
Kwame Nkrumah and through a United Nations technical assistance programme.
He left Ghana and that post in December 1958 and did not return to Ghana
professionally except for a brief visit and engagement in 1963. Hisﬁfteen months
as resident adviser in Ghana were tumultuous, and the interaction with the
government and especially with Kwame Nkrumah was far less benign than the
6
The inﬂuence of the‘Lewis model’on development thinking continues to this day—see Becker and
Craigie (2007) and Gollin (2014).
20 Ravi Kanbur

respectful adoption of his report on industrialization by the legislative assembly
in 1954. In the intervening three years the government’s surpluses from the
post-Korean War commodities boom had increased dramatically, and the pol-
itical situation had developed in a way that made the ruling CPP much more
oriented towards using these surpluses for subsidizing industrialization, espe-
cially when it also served the purpose of shoring up and boosting, or defending
the ruling party against, key political groupings. Large expenditures had been set
in train and were well integrated into the political compromises the government
had had to make.
Arthur Lewis seemed at this point to meet the requirements of all sides of the
economic debate on development. Among those who pressed for radical pro-
grammes of government expenditure to transform economies, to move the former
colonies from primarily agricultural producers to manufacturers in the image of
industrial and colonial power, his early trenchant writings on decolonization, and
his critique of laissez-faire liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s, seemed to give an
indication of advice he would give and actions he would support. And yet there
were those who saw in his industrialization report on the Gold Coast someone
who was more market oriented and alsoﬁscally prudent, developing priorities
based on concrete realities of market failures rather than grand ideological theses
on colonialism. Which side would Arthur Lewis come down on, when faced with
the actual situation in newly independent Ghana?
The answer is now in the history books. There were some policy areas in which
he sided with the government and Nkrumah. Perhaps the most famous of these is
his general agreement that the surpluses from the cocoa price boom should be
collected by the government and used for development purposes rather than
passed through to cocoa farmers, a view very different from positions being
advanced by Bauer (1954) at that time. However, in the main, Lewis clashed
with Nkrumah on the policies being followed by the government, especially on
various‘white elephant’projects that were being considered and approved, many
of them in the name of industrialization.
Even on cocoa, where Lewis supported use of central resources to address a
range of issues such as insecticide spraying, Lewis and Nkrumah disagreed on who
should do it. Lewis favoured the Ministry of Agriculture; Nkrumah wanted it to be
done by the Cocoa Marketing Board because, it turned out, the subcontracting
could be better channelled to political ends (Tignor, 2006: 169). The exchanges
between Lewis and Nkrumah at this time, masterfully documented by Tignor
(2006), provide a real insight into the clash between the economist and the
politician. As quoted by Tignor (2006: 167), in a letter of 1 August 1958, after a
series of attempts by Lewis to intervene in the drafting on the Five Year Plan, his
verdict on the plan was as follows:
It makes inadequate provision for some essential services while according the highest
priority to a number of second importance...Alas, the main reason for this lack of
balance is that the plan contains too many schemes on which the Prime Minister is
insisting for‘political reasons.’...In order to give you these toys, the Development
Commission has had to cut down severely on water supplies, health centers, technical
schools, roads...It is not easy to make a good development plan for £100 million if
the Prime Minister insists on inserting £18 million of his own pet schemes of a sort
which neither develop the country nor increase the comfort of the people.
W. Arthur Lewis and Ghanaian Economic Policy 21

Nkrumah’s responses to Lewis were to be expected from a man who had
famously said‘seek yeﬁrst the political kingdom’. In a letter dated 18 December
1958, in an exchange which brought to a head Lewis’s decision to leave his post as
economic adviser, Nkrumah emphasized‘political decisions which I consider
I must take. The advice you have given me, sound though it may be, is essentially
from the economic point of view, and I have told you, on many occasions, that
I cannot always follow this advice as I am a politician and must gamble on the
future’(Tignor, 2006: 173).
7
The links between economics and politics will be considered further in section
2.4. For now let stay with Lewis the economist. How can one explain the seeming
contradictions? On the one hand he was the critic of laissez-faire economic
policies, whom the radical anti-colonialists expected to be on their side as they
moved to use the state to engender development they viewed as having forestalled
by colonialism. On the other hand he was the economist who acted as a check on
the extreme statist interventions proposed by this same tendency in economic
policy discourse, arguing against heavy state subsidy to industry on purely
economic grounds, even leaving aside its propensity for corruption and use as
political patronage.
Lewis must have read as a student John Maynard Keynes’s clarion call in his
essay‘The End of Laissez Faire’(Keynes, 1926). This was, seemingly, a call to
abandon the tenets of nineteenth-century economic liberalism in favour of a more
interventionist credo:
Let us clear from the ground the metaphysical or general principles upon which, from
time to time,laissez-fairehas been founded. It isnottrue that individuals possess a
prescriptive‘natural liberty’in their economic activities. There isno‘compact’con-
ferring perpetual rights on those who Have or on those who Acquire. The world isnot
so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide. It isnotso
managed here below that in practice they coincide. It isnota correct deduction from
the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public
interest. Nor is it true that self-interest generallyisenlightened; more often individuals
acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain
even these. Experience doesnotshow that individuals, when they make up a social
unit, are always less clear sighted than when they act separately.
(Keynes, 1926: 287–8, emphasis in the original)
This is the Keynes of 1926, reﬂecting the Lewis of the 1930s and 1940s railing
against Sydney Caine and his laissez-faire policies for the colonies. And yet in the
same essay Keynes hints at a different world view, and more nuanced perspective
on state intervention:
We cannot therefore settle on abstract grounds, but must handle on its merits in detail
what Burke termed‘one of theﬁnest problems in legislation, namely, to determine
what the State ought to take upon itself to direct by the public wisdom, and what it
ought to leave, with as little interference as possible, to individual exertion.’....
7
One of Nkrumah’s gambles on the future was the Volta dam, on which Lewis disagreed with him
mightily. It could be argued that the transformative power of the dam is seen more clearly in retrospect
than could have been seen in the narrow cost-beneﬁt calculations which Lewis was relying on as an
economist.
22 Ravi Kanbur

Perhaps the chief task of economists at this hour is to distinguish afresh theAgendaof
government from theNon Agenda...The important thing for government is not to
do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little
worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.
(Keynes, 1926: 288–91)
How like Lewis, or how like the economist Lewis became, we might add. Keynes,
as has been remarked, wanted to modify and save capitalism for the world rather
than destroy it. Lewis, perhaps, wanted to modify and harness capitalism for
decolonization and development, rather than yearn for a world without capital-
ism, which indeed was what many of his student contemporaries, and many of his
Ghanaian policy counterparts yearned for.
I have argued elsewhere (Kanbur, 2016) that Edmund Burke’s question of how
‘to determine what the State ought to take upon itself to direct by the public
wisdom, and what it ought to leave, with as little interference as possible, to
individual exertion’is the eternal question of political economy. Those who
indeed take it as the deﬁning question of political economy and economic policy
discourse are driven to what might seem to others as a middle ground, where there
are general principles but no uniform answers, each policy prescription depending
on the speciﬁc conditions at hand.
8
This is what allowed Lewis to support some
industrial intervention in hisﬁrst report on the Gold Coast while at the same time
asserting the primacy of agricultural development. It is what allowed him to
support substantial taxation of cocoa while at the same time railing at the
(economic and political) misuse of the funds so raised. That was Arthur Lewis
in Ghana, but it was Arthur Lewis all along.
2.4 AFTER GHANA: POLITICS AND ECONOMICS
Arthur Lewis’s biographer Tignor (2006) notes that after Lewis left Ghana in 1958
he reduced his work on Africa in general and on Ghana in particular. He did
return once, in 1963, for a conference at which the so-called‘Seven Year Plan’was
discussed. The plan itself was assessed by a galaxy of stars, including names such
as Albert Hirschman, Nicholas Kaldor, Osvaldo Sunkel, K. N. Raj, and of course
Lewis himself. Later authors such as Killick (2010) have attributed the plan’s
statist inclinations at least partly on this assemblage of economists, including
Lewis, rather than it being all about‘politics’. But Tignor (2006) disagrees, arguing
that Lewis did indeed criticize the plan from an economic standpoint, which is
what we might have expected given his reactions to theﬁrst plan, during his
period as economic adviser.
Whatever the resolution of the speciﬁc perspective put forward by Killick
(2010), what is indeed clear is that Arthur Lewis’s involvement with Ghanaian,
and African, economic policymaking declined rapidly after he left Ghana in
1958. By 1963 he had, via a four-year period at the University of the West Indies,
8
For a further development of this argument, see Devarajan and Kanbur (2014).
W. Arthur Lewis and Ghanaian Economic Policy 23

become a Professor at Princeton, and in the economic arena had embarked upon
a sweeping programme of research which culminated in an avalanche of books
and articles on development and helped establish him as the pre-eminent
development economist of his generation (see, as just one example, Lewis,
1978). So when the Nobel Prize came in 1979, it was no surprise at all. But
there was one aspect of Africa on which he did write trenchantly after he left
Ghana, and that was on politics—notjustinGhanabutinWestAfricamore
generally. HisPolitics in West Africa(Lewis, 1965) is now required reading for
scholars of African development, especially those who wish to see economics in
the context of politics.
The publication ofPolitics in West Africaled to some critiques reminiscent
of Lewis’s own critique of Margery Perham a quarter of a century earlier. As Mine
(2006: 349) notes:‘Colin Legum criticized Lewis’s characterization of West African
politicians as“rogues”,“unscrupulous bosses”, and“power hungry demagogues”’.
This is not surprising, given what Lewis (1965: 30) actually says:
Different politicians had different motives. These can be grouped in four categories:
(1) Love of power and its material rewards. (2) Conviction that opposition policies
are dangerous...(3) Conviction that opposition tactics weaken the efﬁciency of the
state...(4) Ideological conviction that an elite political party is the supreme instru-
ment of society.
It is also clear from Tignor (2006) that Lewis became deeply disillusioned in the
late 1950s by what he saw as the anti-democratic turn taken by Nkrumah:
The fascist state is in full process of creation, and Iﬁnd it hard to live in a country
where I cannot protest against imprisonment without trial or the new legislation
prohibiting strikes and destroying trade union independence. (Tignor, 2006: 172)
But the deeper reasoning behind the presumed need for the‘big man’or the single
party state is important. Essential to Lewis’s argument is that (West) African
society is not based on class but on other cleavages:
West African society does notﬁt into the Marxist categories. The area is under-
populated, so land is abundant...Hence landlords, rents, oppressed peasants and
landless labourers are rare....West Africa is simply not a class society on Marxist
lines...Now to say that this is not a class society is not to say that society is
undifferentiated. There is no concentration of owners of instruments of production
who monopolize political power. Nevertheless, the society is divided both vertically
and horizontally; vertically in the sense that some people rank higher than others; and
horizontally in the sense that some groups are marked off from each other by tribe,
language, habitation or other division which causes group solidarity.
(Lewis, 1965: 18–19)
Added to this is the fact that patterns of colonization, and then post-colonization
reallocations such as those at the Berlin Conference of 1884–5, or after the First
World War, left Africa with‘unnatural’states after decolonization. Basil Davidson
(1992) refers to this legacy of severe horizontal cleavages in these newly inde-
pendent countries as‘The Black Man’s Burden’.
Arthur Lewis’s answer to the cleavages in African states, which were converting
standard political set ups imported from the West into single party states, was the
development of pluralist democracy characterized by proportional representation,
24 Ravi Kanbur

coalition government and devolution. These proposals were themselves debated at
the time, and continue to be on the front burner. But, most importantly, Lewis
established front and centre that politics matters for economic development.
In the words of his biographer, Arthur Lewis’sPolitics in West Africa:
was also prescient. Ghana’s chief economic expert’s assertion that economic change
did not operate in a vacuum needed to be heard...What later became known as the
new institutional economics,...that politics and economics could not be treated as
separate from each other when analyzing a country’s prospects for economic better-
ment were imbedded in this book...(Tignor, 2006: 210–11)
YetPolitics in West Africaraises new questions about the exchanges between
Kwame Nkrumah and Arthur Lewis in the 1950s. Nkrumah, who soughtﬁrst
the political kingdom, and who argued when offered economic advice by
Lewis that‘IcannotalwaysfollowthisadviceasIamapolitician’, seems to
come across the worse in these exchanges, at least as seen in the correspond-
ence presented in Tignor’s (2006) biography. It is the economist as guardian
of an egalitarian development oriented social welfare function versus the
venal politician using state resourcesto further his political objectives or,
worse, to feather his own nest. It is a contest set to favour the economist. But
is it entirely fair?
Return, then, to Lewis’s own characterization of African polity as riven by
intersections of horizontal cleavages, exacerbated by the after effects colonialism.
In these situations policies which will advance the growth of average income, or
even reduce poverty and inequality as conventionally measured, may well end up
cutting across the many group divides in the nation, as addressed and analysed for
example by Stewart (2008).
9
Maintaining the horizontal balance may then mean
not necessarily following policies that would be efﬁcient from a conventional
economic standpoint. Leaving to one side any personalﬁnancial gain, and also
antidemocratic actions taken by Ghanaian leaders, should we not, on Lewis’s own
grounds, be more sympathetic to Nkrumah’s dilemmas as an economic policy-
maker when faced with these cleavages?
10
At the time of its 60th birthday, Ghana has had peaceful hand overs of power in
a multiparty system of the conventional type for a quarter century. And yet the
horizontal cleavages of region, ethnic group, language, and religion remain, and
are of the essence in Ghanaian politics, and therefore in Ghanaian economic
policymaking as well. These tensions have of course been exacerbated by the
discovery of oil, and the regional imbalances which this portends.
11
The Lewis-
Nkrumah exchanges continue to have modern relevance as Ghanaian policy-
makers and economists interact in formulating policies for the seventh and
eight decades of Ghana’s independence.
9
For an economic theoretic analysis of such divisions, see Dasgupta and Kanbur (2007).
10
For an early attempt at formal analysis of political constraints on standard economic policy-
making, see Kanbur and Myles (1992).
11
The impact of oil is of course a complex matter with a range of interacting causal factors—see
Obeng-Odoom (2015).
W. Arthur Lewis and Ghanaian Economic Policy 25

2.5 CONCLUSION
W. Arthur Lewis and Ghana became entwined very early on, and in one sense
Ghanaian economic policy even today bears the marks of that interaction, because
it touched the very fundamentals of the economist’s approach to policymaking,
and the question of the primacy of politics over economics. From his early
beginnings as a fervent decolonizer, perhaps inﬂuenced somewhat by his radical
student contemporaries and the Keynesian revolution of the 1930s and 1940s,
Arthur Lewis was rightly skeptical of thoroughgoing laissez-faire liberalism. But,
rather like Keynes himself, his instincts were to use capitalism rather than discard
it or overthrow it. In this he differed from many of his contemporaries, and indeed
from many of the leaders of Ghana’s struggle for independence, with whom
Lewis’s association deepened in the 1950s. Far from being a central planner of
the conventional‘Gosplan’type, Lewis’s approach was more work-a-day cost–
beneﬁt, identifying and addressing market failures as they came to light, rather
than an ideological thrust in one direction or another.
Lewis, however, became highly sceptical of politicians and their role in eco-
nomic policymaking. Even leaving to one side personal venality and corruption,
the politicians’need to balance competing interests, and thereby making decisions
which were inefﬁcient or inequitable from a purely economic perspective, vexed
Lewis to the point where he left his position as economic adviser to the Ghanaian
government. He then wrote in trenchant terms about politics in Africa, proposing
a pluralist vision in the face of myriad horizontal divisions which faced economist
and politicians alike. But it appears that Lewis was less than charitable to the
balances and political compromises which have to be made in the face of these
horizontal divisions. Perhaps, after all, the economists’skill lies in devising ways
for how and how far we can incorporate these political constraints into our
analysis and discourse on efﬁciency, equity, and economic policymaking. Lewis
the great pragmatic economist was always skilled in this way, even when the
politics eventually stretched economics to the limit.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I am grateful to Franklin Obeng-Odoom for very useful comments on an earlier draft of this
chapter.
REFERENCES
Bauer, Peter. (1954).West African Trade: A Study of Competition, Oligarchy, and Monopoly
in a Changing Economy.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Becker, Charles M. and Terry-Ann Craigie. (2007).‘W. Arthur Lewis in Retrospect’.Review
of Black Political Economy, 34: 187–216.
Dasgupta, Indraneel and Ravi Kanbur. (2007).‘Community and Class Antagonism’.Journal
of Public Economics, 91(9): 1816–42.
Davidson, Basil. (1992).The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation State.
London: Times Books.
26 Ravi Kanbur

Devarajan, Shantayanan and Ravi Kanbur. (2014).‘Development Strategy as Balancing
Market and Government Failure’,inInternational Development: Ideas, Experience, and
Prospects, ed. B. Currie-Alder, D. Malone, and R. Medhora. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Gollin, Douglas. (2014).‘The Lewis Model: A 60-Year Perspective’.Journal of Economic
Perspectives, 28(3): 71–88.
Kanbur, Ravi. (2016).‘The End of Laissez Faire, the End of History and the Structure of
Scientiﬁc Revolutions’.Challenge, 59(1): 35–46.
Kanbur, Ravi and Gareth Myles. (1992).‘Policy Choice and Political Constraints’.European
Journal of Political Economy, 8(1): 1–29.
Keynes, John Maynard. (1926).‘The End of Laissez-Faire’, reprinted inThe Collected
Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Volume IX, Essays in Persuasion. Royal Economic
Society. Cambridge: Palgrave Macmillan, 1972.
Killick, Tony. (2010).Development Economics in Action: A Study of Economic Policies in
Ghana. London: Routledge.
Lewis, W. Arthur. (1939).Labour in the West Indies: The Birth of a Workers’Movement.
London: Fabian Society.
Lewis, W. Arthur. (1944).‘An Economic Plan for Jamaica’.Agenda: A Quarterly Journal of
Reconstruction, 5(4): 154–63.
Lewis, W. Arthur. (1949).The Principles of Planning: A Study Prepared for the Fabian
Society. London: Dennis Dobson/Allen & Unwin.
Lewis, W. Arthur. (1953).Report on Industrialization of the Gold Coast. Accra. Available at:
<http://www.worldcat.org/title/report-on-industrialisation-and-the-gold-coast/oclc/
8271257>,accessed 20 September 2016.
Lewis, W. Arthur. (1954).‘Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour’.
Manchester School, 22 (2): 139–91.
Lewis, W. Arthur. (1965).Politics in West Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lewis, W. Arthur. (1978).Growth and Fluctuations, 1870–1913.London: Allen and Unwin.
Mine, Yoichi. (2006).‘
The Political Element in the Works of W. Arthur Lewis: The 1954
Lewis Model and African Development’.The Developing Economies, XLVI(3): 329–55.
Obeng-Odoom, Franklin. (2015).‘Global Political Economy and Frontier Economies in
Africa: Implications from the Oil and Gas Industry in Ghana’.Energy Research & Social
Science, 10: 41–56.
Stewart, Frances (ed.). (2008).Horizontal Inequalities and Conﬂict Understanding Group
Violence in Multiethnic Societies.Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tignor, Robert L. (2006).W. Arthur Lewis and the Birth of Development Economics.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
W. Arthur Lewis and Ghanaian Economic Policy 27

3
Property and Freedom
Franklin Obeng-Odoom
3.1 INTRODUCTION
The most neglected aspect of Ghana’s independence is also the most fundamental
of the demands made by the independence movement: freedom from the tyranny
of colonialideasandpracticesabout property. Ghana’s independence brought the
country one step closer to transforming the socially embedded property relations
that were brutally assaulted by colonialism. Theﬁrst independent state changed
the register of‘property’from one which emphasized an alliance between the
colonizer and the supposed epitome of traditions to a notion of‘property’ﬁrmly
located in the public and later the republic. This transformation in theideaof
property was partly a reaction against the pro-colonial role played by chiefs during
the colonial era, partly to prevent the use of land revenues to support opposition
to Nkrumah’s government, but particularly to pursuecollective freedomthrough a
philosophy of state socialism. A collectiveideaof property was, therefore, linked
to a collectivepracticeof property. While this mode of property differed from the
communally embedded property relations that dominated the society prior to
colonialism, its expressed values were similarly spirited because the independence
register of property tried to draw on a pan-African and indigenous set of ethos.
Since thecoup d’étatof 24 February 1966, however, both the idea and the
practice of property have undergone a great transformation. In the register of
property,‘private property’has been inserted and the practice of‘development’
has continued to be interpreted as freeing property of its social bonds in order to
make it conducive to economic growth. The collective freedom pursued by the
ﬁrst independence state was replaced by a new idea of freedom: individual
freedom. To actualize this individual freedom, property had to beﬁtted with the
features that make it tradable and not only tradable but easily tradable. More
fundamentally, this property regime is strongly anchored to the idea that devel-
opment is best driven by external actors through foreign direct investment and in
the form of mechanized agriculture.
For new institutional economists (e.g., North, 1991; Anderson and Libecap,
2014), the turn to individual property and freedom in Ghana must signify the
superiority of this property regime over socially embedded property and its
practices of collective freedom. Private property in terms of individual ownership
of land, including water, is intrinsically a good thing. It guarantees‘human rights’

(such as the right to free speech, to life, and to personal freedom). Indeed, private
property is also instrumental in assuring social peace, poverty reduction, and the
eradication of disease, hunger, and misery. In short, private property and the
rights to it form the cornerstone of capitalism as a system, the good society.
Denying individual private property rights and yielding these to the state can only
be a ticket to despotic, autocratic, and tyrannical rule (see Cirillo, 1966 for a
summary of the‘negative view’or what might happen if individual private
property rights are denied). This line of thought echoes—indeed, it magniﬁes—
Garett Hardin’s notion of‘the tragedy of the commons’and earlier philosophical
traditions on property such as the Lockean theory of property (Obeng-Odoom,
2016). The resulting policy implications have ranged from commodifying land
and enabling land markets to making land sector agencies market-oriented.
It is within this context that costly and large-scale registration of land has been
undertaken in Ghana (for land policy in Ghana, see Aryeetey et al., 2007; Obeng-
Odoom, 2013a), strongly suggesting that if there are‘problems in the land market’,
it must be because of an‘external (ity)’. In turn, it is more—rather than less—
commodiﬁcation that is needed to internalize problems toﬁt the logic of the market.
In this chapter, I provide an alternative view: freedom without—or with
limited—individual private property in land and water resources. I draw on the
traditions of institutional economics that emphasize the social basis and function
of landed property (Ely, 1914), the commodiﬁcation of which destroys freedoms
of all kinds (Polanyi ([1944] 2001: 76) in a way that generates social conﬂict or the
potential for such conﬂicts.
For an institutionalist analysis, I examine the institutions that structure, and are
in turn structured by, transforming property relations in the country and invert the
usual approach of measuring‘success’or‘failure’based only on the outcomes of
the present mode of property relations. Instead, I emphasize theopportunity costof
current land policy framed around speciﬁc ideas in new institutional economics. In
so doing, I turn to the precolonial conception of property to investigate the historic
debate on whether property is natural or naturalized (Schlatter, 1951), to look into
contestations about autochthony (Lentz, 2010, 2013) and its wider conﬂicts, which
characterize in the process of property transformation (Commons, 1924, 1934).
My interest is not in conﬂicts per se but how they arise, shape, transform, and are
indeed transformed by property—for freedom.
The chapter argues that the Nkrumahist idea of property, with its related
practices of property, led to troubling outcomes, including restricted freedoms
and maldistribution of asset wealth in sharp contrast to the rhetoric about property
and freedom under state socialism. However, the turn to‘private property’of the
new institutionalist and neoliberal since the fall of statist socialism has created much
worse levels of inequality and conﬂict. Not only has this property register further
restricted freedom, or fallen short of aggregating its individual freedoms into
collective freedom, but it has also set loose oppression among previously free
peoples and displaced entire villages. Such outcomes arising from the private view
of property warrant fundamental changes in society, but seeking a return to the
statist conception of property that pertained during the era of Nkrumah would
generate similar contradictions that pertained at the time and continue to date
(Owusu-Ofori and Obeng-Odoom, 2015). The precolonial property regime was
far moreres communisand evidently more conducive to social, economic, and
Property and Freedom 29

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O spirit that heard, and kept his word!
O countenance moulded like his own!
Behold, she seemed on earth to dwell;
But, hid in light, alone she sat
Beneath the throne ineffable,
Chanting her clear magnificat.
Fed from the boundless heart of God,
The Joy within her rose more high.
And all her being overflowed,
Until the awful hour was nigh.
Then, then there crept her spirit o'er
The shadow of that pain world-wide,
Whereof her Son the substance bore;—
Him offering, half in him she died.
Standing like that strange moon, whereon
The mask of earth lies dim and dead,
An orb of glory, shadow-strewn,
Yet girdled with a luminous thread.
For originality, and perfect expression of an idea by an image, we
know of nothing better in all our range of poetry than those two
similes. That last is especially wonderful for its reconditeness. Who
would ever think of an annular eclipse of the moon as an illustration
of religion? And yet how marvellously well it does illustrate! The first
verse of the poem is very poor and strained in its rhythm, and the
second not much better in its mysticism, which is rather adapted to
the enthusiasm of the middle ages; but the end counterbalances all.
Having thus digressed to the Blessed Virgin, we go on to note in
how many lights these poems display her. The idea of her they
present is, to an ordinary idea, as the flashing, many-faceted jewel

to the rough gem of the mines. Here, for example, the whole poetry
of motherhood is pressed into her service in a few dense lines:
{80}
O Mother-Maid! to none save thee
Belongs in full a parent's name:
So faithful thy virginity,
Thy motherhood so pure from blame!
All other parents, what are they?
Thy types. In them thou stood'st rehearsed,
(As they in bird, and bud, and spray).
Thine Antitype? The Eternal First!
Prime Parent He: and next Him thou!
Overshadowed by the Father's Might,
Thy 'Fiat' was thy bridal vow;
Thine offspring He, the "Light of Light."
Her Son Thou wert: her Son Thou art,
O Christ! Her substance fed Thy growth:—
She shaped Thee in her virgin heart,
Thy Mother and Thy Father both!
Let us pass on from this, without breaking the continuity, to
CONSERVABAT IN CORDE.
As every change of April sky
Is imaged in a placid brook,
Her meditative memory
Mirrored His every deed and look.
As suns through summer ether rolled
Mature each growth the spring has wrought,

So Love's strong day-star turned to gold
Her harvests of quiescent thought.
Her soul was as a vase, and shone
Translucent to an inner ray;
Her Maker's finger wrote thereon
A mystic Bible new each day.
Deep Heart! In all His sevenfold might
The Paraclete with thee abode;
And, sacramented there in light,
Bore witness of the things of God.
The last verse has a flaw rare in these volumes—a mixture of
metaphors. In the first two lines, "heart" is strongly personified, and
clearly represents Mary herself. In the third with no intimation
whatever, and without a break in the construction of the sentence,
the same heart is become a place, and is indicated by "there." We
cannot imagine how the author, with his susceptible taste, read it
over in the proof-sheets without feeling the jar of the phrases.
So much for the loving side of Mary's character. In depicting her
suffering, the poet has even excelled this. The first broad stroke of
his picture is
MATER DOLOROSA
She stood: she sank not. Slowly fell
Adown the Cross the atoning blood.
In agony ineffable
She offered still His own to God.
No pang of His her bosom spared;
She felt in Him its several power.
But she in heart His Priesthood shared:
She offered Sacrifice that hour. . . .

Beautifully our author hag named the succeeding poem also Mater
Dolorosa. The one is the agony of loss, the other the bitterness of
bereavement:
From her He passed: yet still with her
The endless thought of Him found rest;
A sad but sacred branch of myrrh
For ever folded in her breast.
A Boreal winter void of light—
So seemed her widowed days forlorn:
She slept; but in her breast all night
Her heart lay waking till the morn.
Sad flowers on Calvary that grew;—
Sad fruits that ripened from the Cross;—
These were the only joys she knew:
Yet all but these she counted loss.
Love strong as Death! She lived through thee
That mystic life whose every breath
From Life's low harp-string amorously
Draws out the sweetened name of Death.
Love stronger far than Death or Life!
Thy martyrdom was o'er at last
Her eyelids drooped; and without strife
To Him she loved her spirit passed.
For once we can leave the of a poem to the unaided italics with a
good grace. To expound the exquisiteness of these lines would be
like botanically dissecting a lily. But there is a deeper underlying
excellence that may perhaps not suggest itself so irresistibly—the
marvellous intuitive delicacy of the whole conception embodied by
this poem. Only a truly profound religious feeling could thus happily
have characterized the effect of such a sorrow on such a nature. A

mere pietist would have painted a sanctified apathy; a merely smart
writer would have imbued her with an eagerness for the end of
earthly trouble; a man of talent would have made her resigned to
death; the man of genius makes her resigned to life. Here is the
effortless exactness of true poet.
Two more views, and we can turn from this picture of the Blessed
Virgin of the May Carols—one, her human and inferior relation to
God; and the other, her human and superior relation to ourselves. To
the first point, perhaps the most explicit of the poems is the
following, which, also, is a good example of the author s peculiar,
sudden manner of turning his broad philosophy into the channel of
some forcible application:
{81}
Not all thy purity, although
The whitest moon that ever lit
The peaks of Lebanonian snow
Shone dusk and dim compared with it;—
Not that great love of thine, whose beams
Transcended in their virtuous heat
Those suns which melt the ice-bound streams,
And make earth's pulses newly beat:—
It was not these that from the sky
Drew down to thee the Eternal Word:
He looked on thy humility;
He knew thee, "Handmaid of thy Lord."
Let no one claim with thee a part;
Let no one, Mary, name thy name,
While, aping God, upon his heart
Pride sits, a demon robed in flame.

Proud Vices, die! Where Sin has place
Be Sin's familiar self-disgust.
Proud Virtues, doubly die; that Grace
At last may burgeon from your dust.
But the poem which of all most truly, tenderly, and perfectly
develops the whole beautiful spiritual dependence of the true
Catholic upon the Mother of his God, is the Mater Divinae Gratis,
already published in The Catholic World for May, p. 216.
The beauty of this piece has already attracted wide attention. The
wonder is that any Catholic could have passed it by. It is a
theological treatise in itself. Could all the repositories of divinity
furnish a more complete reputation of those cold and narrow
organisms (we hesitate to call them hearts) whose breasts would
seem to have room for just so much piety, of a prescribed quality
and regulation pattern, and who insist that every one we love is a
unit in the divisor which assigns to each his portion of that known
and limited store, our affection? These people sincerely cannot see
how one can love Mary too without loving God less. It is as if a tree
could not strike another root without sapping its trunk. Perish this
narrowness! How long before these strait-laced souls—the moral
progeny of that unhappiest of men, Calvin—will learn to love God as
well as believe in him?
There is something very difficult of analysis about the power of
these poems. They have none of that dramatic force which consists
in skilfully selecting and emphasizing the striking sonnets of the
situation. De Vere's strength does not seem to tend toward the
outward personality, but rather lies in the direction of the soul and
its sensations. When we lay down the May Carols, we do not
conceive a whit the more clearly how the Virgin Mary looked; there
is no impression to overlie and mar our memories of the great
painters' pictures of her. But we cannot read aright without bearing
away an expanded comprehension and near, real, vivid insight into
her love, her pain, her humility, her deserving, her glory. We so

enter in spirit into the scenes of her life as absolutely to lose sight of
the surroundings. This kind of power may not be the most broadly
effective, but we must admit that it reaches our admiration through
our best faculties. Its secret lies in the fact that the author's own
ideas both of Christ and his Mother are so complete and exalted. At
what advantage, for example, he stands over the author of Ecce
Homo, who, it seems, would have us believe Christ in his childhood
to have been a Hebrew boy, much like other Hebrew boys, till ill-
explained causes metamorphosed a Galilean peasant youth into the
most transcendent genius of history! With this cold casuistic theory
compare De Vere's picture of the mother lying worshipping by the
moonlit cradle of her Son and God. He accepts in their entirety the
received ideas of the church, neither varying nor wishing to vary one
jot or tittle of the law, but lovingly investing it with all the
developments of thought and all the decorations of fancy. No
Catholic can help being struck by the singular doctrinal accuracy
which pervades without perturbing the whole of this work. The result
is a portraiture of the incarnation and the Blessed Virgin, such as an
author who could set all the ruggedness of Calvary before our eyes,
and make every waving olive-leaf in Gethsemane musically mournful
in our souls, could not hope to rival by all the efforts of graphic
genius.
{82}
But scarcely less remarkable is the success in the other grand aim of
the May Carols—what he himself calls "an attempt at a Christian
rendering of external nature." His attempt has brought forth a series
of purely descriptive pieces, interspersed at intervals, intended to
present the symbolism which the aspect of May's successive phases
might offer to the imagination of faith. To cultivate Christianity in the
shifting soil of fancy is of itself a bold endeavor; but when the
method proposed is by picturing the delicate and evanescent shades
of spring's advance, the difficulty can be realized.

How far the author succeeds in this most subtle undertaking of
educing the symbolism of May, we must leave to country criticism for
final adjudication. We have our opinion; we can discover many
sweet emblems; but we cannot analyze or reason out our thoughts
satisfactorily. We recognize portraits in the May-gallery, but are not
familiar enough with nature's costumes to judge of the historical
order. We can exult with the earth in the gladness of the season; we
are permeated in a measure, as are all, with the influences of the
bluer skies, the softer breezes, the more confident advance of the
flowers. But when it comes to reading the succession of the
changing clouds, harmonizing the melody of the gales, deciphering
the hieroglyphics that spring's myriad fingers write in verdure on the
woods and meadows, we feel that ours is but a city acquaintance
with May. We have rested too well content with the beauty to think
of its moral suggestiveness or significance.
But this we do know, that the author has struck such a vein of
descriptive felicity that, according to Dr. Holmes's witty logic, he can
afford to write no more description till he dies. There are touches of
this here and there in other places, but nothing to promise such little
gems of landscape as stud the May Carols. There is an accession of
naturalness and a flow of happy phrases as soon as he reaches one
of these themes, that is like swimming out of fresh water into salt.
Take for instance, this:
When April's sudden sunset cold
Through boughs half-clothed with watery sheen
Bursts on the high, new-cowslipped wold,
And bathes a world half gold half green,
Then shakes the illuminated air
With din of birds; the vales far down
Grow phosphorescent here and there;
Forth flash the turrets of the town;
Along the sky thin vapors scud;

Bright zephyrs curl the choral main;
The wild ebullience of the blood
Rings joy-bells in the heart and brain:
Yet in that music discords mix;
The unbalanced lights like meteors play;
And, tired of splendors that perplex,
The dazzled spirit sighs for May.
It is a great disadvantage to these beautiful little poems to be thus
taken from their frames, thereby losing their emblematic and
retaining only their intrinsic beauty. But even so, there are two more
which we fearlessly present on the merit of their own unaided
charms. Here is the first:
Brow-bound with myrtle and with gold,
Spring, sacred now from blasts and blights,
Lifts in a firm, untrembling hold
Her chalice of fulfilled delights.
Confirmed around her queenly lip
The smile late wavering, on she moves;
And seems through deepening tides to step
Of steadier joys and larger loves.
The stony Ash itself relents,
Into the blue embrace of May
Sinking, like old impenitents
Heart-touched at last; and, far away,
The long wave yearns along the coast
With sob suppressed, like that which thrills
(While o'er the altar mounts the Host)
Some chapel on the Irish hills.

We scarcely know which to admire most, the precise, clear-cut
elegance of the opening personification, the beauty of the third
verse, or the melody (how the first line matches the sense!) and
admirable comparison in the last one. Only, if the poet had ever
waded among the waves of bloom of our western prairies, he would
have found a better expression than the awkward one of "deepening
tides," which is out of character with the rest.
{83}
But the last one we give is the finest. We had put it in the first rank
ourselves before finding that it had also struck the fine ear of Mr.
Landor. It is a Claude Lorraine done into verse:
Pleasant the swarm about the bough;
The meadow-whisper round the woods;
And for their coolness pleasant now
The murmur of the falling floods.
Pleasant beneath the thorn to lie,
And let a summer fancy loose;
To hear the cuckoo's double cry;
To make the noon-tide sloth's excuse.
Panting, but pleased, the cattle stand
Knee-deep in water-weed and sedge,
And scarcely crop the greener band
Of osiers round the river's edge.
But hark! Far off the south wind sweeps
The golden-foliaged groves among,
Renewed or lulled, with rests and leaps—
Ah! how it makes the spirit long
To drop its earthly weight, and drift
Like yon white cloud, on pinions free,

Beyond that mountain's purple rift,
And o'er that scintillating sea!
We do not think we can say anything that will add to this.
There are two very noticeable faults of detail in the May Carols. One
is the great occasional looseness of rhyme. We are no lover even of
the so-called rhymes to the eye—words ending, but not pronounced
alike—but when there is no similarity of sound at all, we
emphatically demur. Here are some, taken at random, of the
numberless false rhymes which disfigure these poems: "Hills—
swells;" "height—infinite;" "best—least" (these last two in one short
piece of sixteen lines); "buds—multitudes;" "repose—coos;" "flower
—more;" "pierce—universe," etc. Now such as these are utterly
indefensible. The different sounds of the same vowel are as different
among themselves as from any other sounds, and there is no sense
in taking advantage of the accident that they are represented by the
same letter to cheat the ear and plead the poverty of the alphabet.
In a man who labored for words, we could condone a roughness
here and there; but in a writer of De Vere's fluency there is no
excuse for such gross carelessness.
We observe also at intervals a kind of baldness of expression—a
ruggedness and disregard of beauty in uttering ideas—that is
unpleasant. We think, with a learned friend who first drew our
attention to it, that this comes of the authors anxiety and
determination to be clear. The lines seem like men trained down to
fighting-weight—all strength and no contour. No doubt the high and
difficult ideas to be rendered (for it is never seen in the descriptive
interludes) constitute ample cause for this fault; but yet, in noticing
the whole, we are constrained to note it as a blemish.
It remains to speak of the author's poems on Ireland. Here it is
evident that he feels warmly as the chief organizer himself; and yet
nothing can be further from to-day's Fenianism than the tone of his
writings. Irish they are to the core—as animated as the best in

proclaiming the wrongs of Ireland and the misrule of the invaders—
but from the same premises somehow he seems to draw a different
conclusion. This is to our author one of those near and dear subjects
which are elements in a man's inner life: he has published another
volume [Footnote 21] upon it, and a large portion of his poems turn
on it. Most of the best among his single poems—The Irish Celt to the
Irish Norman, the Ode to Ireland, the beautiful Year of Sorrow, and
others—are either too long or too close-woven for quotation.
Another able one is The Sisters, which is full of beautiful thoughts,
independent of the Irish bearing.
[Footnote 21: English Misrule and Irish Misdeeds. London,
1848.]
But the most prominent and elaborate of these poems is Inisfail, or
Ireland in the Olden Time—a chronological series of odes, songs,
and all manner of remarks in rhyme, illustrative of Ireland's history
and the feeling of her people, through the various epochs of her
national and denationalized life. There is more historical research,
more talent, and more time buried to waste in this poem, than
would make ten ordinary shallow reputations. The author shows a
thorough and a vitalized knowledge of Irish history, and he
penetrates well and nobly the {84} succession of popular sentiment;
nay, he has done a more difficult thing still—he has caught much of
the spirit of bardic verse. Only our very decided and deliberate
opinion is, that the spirit of bardic verse is extremely like the gorilla
—very hard to catch, and not particularly beautiful when caught. We
have read, we are fairly sure, the better part of the English-Irish
poetry that has attained any note—that class of which Clarence
Mangan stands at the head, and are very much grieved and
dissatisfied with it. Wherever the Gaelic ode-form is adopted, or the
Gaelic symbolism—the Roisin Dhu, Silk of the Kine, etc.—we cannot
help wishing it absent. Whatever has pleased us in poems of this
sort would have pleased as well or better in another guise; whatever
has fatigued or offended, has generally done so on account of its
Gaelic form. From weary experience, we have reached the firm

conclusion that the Gaelic style is peculiarly adapted to the Erse
tongue, and we earnestly hope that future twangings of the harp
that hung in Tara's halls may be either in the aforesaid dialect, or
else, like Moore's Irish Melodies (and does any one wish for anything
more nobly Irish?), consonant in style with the spirit of the language
they are written in. The best talent devoted to grafting Gaelic
blossoms on English stems has only served to show them essentially
uncongenial. Every attempt of this kind reads like a translation from
Erse into English, and, like all translations, hints in every turn of the
superiority of the original. And, speaking disinterestedly (we are, as
it happens, neither Gael nor Sassenach), we scarcely think any
translator likely to swim in waters where Clarence Mangan barely
floated.
Thus we admire much of Inisfail for the wonderful adaptiveness
which revivifies for us the dead feelings of dead generations, while
at the same time we cannot thoroughly like nor enjoy it. There is
great artistic taste throughout, but the poetical merit, as indeed
might be expected, Appears to us to be greatest in the delineations
from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century—neither too far nor
too near in point of time. The outlawry times elicit some fine lines: in
fact, violation of law seems always to bring our author out at his
best. Of the earlier poems, perhaps the best are The Malison and
The Faithful Norman. These are of the first, or pure Irish period. The
next, or Irish-Norman epoch, is full of the best and the worst of our
author's verse. Of The Bard Ethell we have spoken before. The Bier
that Conquered is a striking poem, as are also the quaint, rambling,
suggestive lines called The Wedding of the Clans. Amid several long,
fierce, and highly Gaelic exultations over battles, chiefs, and things
in general, we find a noble poem. The Bishop of Ross, which we
really regret we cannot quote here. Just before it, however, is one of
the best which we may have space for:
KING CHARLES'S "GRACES."
A.D. 1626

"Thus babble the strong ones, 'The chain is slackened!
Ye can turn half round on your sides to sleep!
With the thunderbolt still your isle is blackened,
But it hurls no bolt upon tower or steep.
We are slaves in name! Old laws proscribed you;
But the king is kindly, the Queen is fair.
They are knaves or fools who would goad or bribe you
A legal freedom to claim. Beware!'
II.
"We answer and thus: Our country's honor
To us is dear as our country's life!
That stigma the bad law casts upon her
Is the brand on the fame of a blameless wife
Once more we answer: From honor never
Can safety long time be found apart;
The bondsman that vows not his bond to sever,
Is a slave by right, and a slave in heart!"
There is the true ring about this—strength and spirit both. Close by
it is another—the only one of the odes we like—The Suppression of
the Faith in Ulster, which is of the same calibre.
The last book (there are three) is full of beauty as the style grows
modern. But we have cited so much that is beautiful, that we prefer
quoting one of the few but forcible instances where our most
Christian poet gives vent to his very considerable powers of sarcasm:
{85}
GOOD-HEARTED.
"The young lord betrayed an orphan maid—
The young lord soft-natured and easy:

The man was 'good-hearted,' the neighbors said;
Flung meat to his dogs; to the poor flung bread.
His father stood laughing when Drogheda bled;
He hated a conscience queasy!
II.
"A widow met him, dark trees o'erhead,
Her child and the man just parted—
When home she walked her knife it was red;
Swiftly she walked, and muttered, and said,
'The blood rushed fast from a fount full-fed!
Ay, the young lord was right "good-hearted!"'
III.
"When morning wan its first beam shed.
It fell on a corpse yet wanner;
The great-hearted dogs the young lord had fed
Watched, one at the feet and one at the head—
But their months with a blood-pool hard by were red;
They loved—in the young lord's manner."
There is something about the fierce bitterness here that strongly
reminds one of Tennyson's poem of The Sisters, with its weird line—
"Oh! the Earl was fair to see!"
From several of very nearly the same purport, we select the
following, influenced to choose it, as we own, by the wonderful flow
of its measure, as well as its truly Irish beauty. There is a kind of
peculiar richness of diction that no other nation on earth ever
attains. Every reader of Tom Moore will know what we mean, and
recognize a kindred spirit in

SEMPER RADEM
"The moon, freshly risen from the bosom of ocean,
Hangs o'er it suspended, all mournful yet bright;
And a yellow sea-circle with yearning emotion
Swells up as to meet it, and clings to its light.
The orb, unabiding, grows whiter, mounts higher;
The pathos of darkness descends on the brine—
O Erin! the North drew its light from thy pyre;
Thy light woke the nations; the embers were thine.
II.
"'Tis sunrise! The mountains flash forth, and, new-reddened,
The billows grow lustrous so lately forlorn;
From the orient with vapors long darkened and deadened.
The trumpets of Godhead are pealing the morn:
He rises, the sun, in his might reascending;
Like an altar beneath him lies blazing the sea!
O Erin! who proved thee returns to thee, blending
The future and past in one garland for thee!"
But what we regard as really the finest poem in Inisfail is an
apparent, perhaps a real, exception to our rule above stated, that
whatever of this poetry pleases us would please as well if divested of
its Gaelic form. The charm of this lies in its being so essentially Irish
in conception. It is just such an original, bold, wild inspiration as no
other body than an Irish clan could without incongruity be made to
feel. There is more intense Irishness (what other word will express
it?) in it than in all the poems—ay, and half the poets—of this
century. We give it with the author's own explanation prefixed:
THE PHANTOM FUNERAL.
"James Fitz-Garret, son of the great Earl of Desmond, had been
sent to England, when a child, as a hostage, and was for

seventeen years kept a prisoner in the Tower, and educated in
the Queen's religion. James Fitz-Thomas, the 'Sugane Earl,'
having meantime assumed the title and prerogatives of Earl of
Desmond, the Queen sent her captive to Ireland, attended by
persons devoted to her, and provided with a conditional patent
for his restoration .... As the young earl walked to church, it was
with difficulty that a guard of English soldiers could keep a path
open for him. From street and window and housetop every voice
urged him to fidelity to his ancestral faith. The youth, who did
not even understand the language in which he was adjured,
went on to the Queen's church, as it was called; and with loud
cries his clan rushed away and abandoned his standard for ever.
Shortly afterward he returned to England, where, within a few
months, he died.
Strew the bed and strew the bier
(Who rests upon it was never man)
With all that a little child holds dear,
With violets blue and violets wan.
Strew the bed and strew the bier
With the berries that redden thy shores, Corann;
His lip was the berry, his skin was clear
As the waxen blossom—he ne'er was man.
Far off he sleeps, yet we mourn him here;
Their tale was a falsehood; he ne'er was man!
'Tis a phantom funeral! Strew the bier
With white lilies brushed by the floating swan.
They lie who say that the false queen caught him
A child asleep on the mountains wide;
A captive reared him, a strange faith taught him;—
'Twas for no strange faith that his father died!
They lie who say that the child returned

A man unmanned to his towers of pride;
That his people with curses the false Earl spurned:
Woe, woe, Kilmallock! they lie, and lied!
The clan was wroth at an ill report.
But now the thunder-cloud melts in tears.
The child that was motherless played. "'Twas sport."
A child must sport in his childish years!
Ululah! Ululah! Low, sing low!
The women of Desmond loved well that child!
Our lamb was lost in the winter snow;
Long years we sought him in wood and wild.
How many a babe of Fitzgerald's blood
In hut was fostered though born in hall!
The old stock burgeoned the fair new bud,
The old land welcomed them, each and all!
{86}
Glynn weeps to-day by the Shannon's tide,
And Shanid and she that frowns o'er Deal;
There is woe by the Laune and the Carra's side,
And where the knight dwells by the woody Feale.
In Dingle and Beara they chant his dirge:
Far off he faded—our child—sing low!
We have made him a bed by the ocean's surge,
We have made him a bier on the mountain's brow.
The clan was bereft! the old walls they left;
With cries they rushed to the mountains drear.
But now great sorrow their heart has cleft;—
See, one by one they are drawing near!

Ululah! Ululah! Low, sing low!
The flakes fall fast on the little bier;—
The yew-branch and eagle-plume over them throw!
The last of the Desmond chiefs lies here."
We close, far from completing our sketch of the poet. We have not
exhausted the volumes before us, and they do not exhaust their
author. De Vere has written several other books, mostly of early date
—from 1843 to 1850—which one must read to know him entirely.
But we are very sure that those who will read the books from which
we have drawn our illustrations will read all. There are few authors
who grow so upon the reader. Somehow the force and beauty of the
thoughts do not impress at first. We think the rationale of the
process is that we mostly begin by reading three parts of sound to
one of sense. After the melody comes the harmony; gradually, on
after-reading, the glitter of the words ceases to dazzle, and then, if
ever, we commune mind to mind with the author. This is as rare with
modern readers as a hand-to hand bayonet fight in modern battles.
Now Aubrey de Vere writes a great deal of thought so very quietly,
that we miss the cackling which even talent nowadays is apt to
indulge in on laying any supposed golden eggs of wisdom. Hence we
have some singular opinions about him. One finds him cold and
impassible; another votes him a sort of gentlemanly Fenian
visionary, while a third devotes a column of one of our best
hypercritical periodicals to viewing him as a mere love-poet. These
are all windfall opinions, which had been better ripening on the tree.
The grace, the rhythm, and, above all, the stern ascendency of
truthful exactness over inaccurate felicities of expression, strike one
constantly more and more. We have ourselves passed through these
phases of opinion, besides several others; but every day fortifies our
final conviction. It is, that Aubrey de Vere is one of those true poets
whom the few love well; who will always have admirers, never
popularity; and who must wait for his full fame until that distant but
coming day when blind, deep movements of unity shall thrill the
sects of Christendom, and bigotry no longer veil from the gifted and
appreciative the merits of the first Catholic poet of to-day.

{87}
From The Lamp.

UNCONVICTED;
OR, OLD THORNELEY'S HEIRS.
CHAPTER X.
UNCONVICTED!
Up to the time when James Ball entered the witness-box, the whole
case had been dead against the prisoner. Even the grave doubts
which the cross-examination raised about the housekeeper's veracity
had passed unsubstantiated by any further evidence or proof; and
the cook's story of the footstep on the stairs died out of all reckoning
in the modicum of balance left in favor of the accused man when
Davis, the chemist, had closed his evidence. But when his luckless
assistant got down, after making such astounding admissions, we
breathed again, and hopes that had been trampled under foot rose
once more with renewed buoyancy. The rigid face of Serjeant
Donaldson relaxed into anxious gravity, and the frank, genial
countenance of Mr. Forster—Hugh Atherton's contemporary, and at
whose side he had fought many a legal battle—shook off its cloud as
he sat down and conferred with his senior colleague; whilst I heard
a deep sigh of relief burst from Merrivale as he uttered, "Thank God,
we have got over that rock!"
Then Donaldson rose. I think I hear and see him still, that grey-
headed serjeant, with his rugged Scotch features lighted up by all
the earnestness of his will, all the acute intelligence of his mind, as
he turned to the jury, and in a voice tremulous with emotion, though
it failed not to set forth the firmness of his purpose, and the honest
conviction of his soul, opened his defence of Hugh Atherton.

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