Economies after Colonialism- Ghana and the Struggle for Power

Background

Despite Ghana’s strong democratic track record in recent decades, the economy remains underdeveloped. Industrial policies are necessary to transform the colonial trading economy that Ghana inherited at independence, but successive governments have been unwilling or unable to implement them. In this highly original interpretation, supported by new empirical material, Lindsay Whitfield exposes the reasons for why the Ghanaian economy remains underdeveloped and sets her theory in the wider African context.

She offers a new way of thinking about the political economy of Africa that charts a clear path away from defining Africa in terms of neopatrimonial politics and that provides new conceptual tools for addressing what kind of business-state relations are necessary to drive economic development. As a study of Ghana that addresses both the economy and politics from early colonialism to the present day, this is a must-read for any student or scholar interested in the political economy of development in Africa.

About the speaker

Lindsay Whitfield is Associate Professor in Global Studies at the Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, Denmark, and co-editor of a leading journal in African Studies, African Affairs. She also held previous positions at the Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen, and at University of Oxford, UK. She holds a D.Phil. in Politics from the University of Oxford, UK.

Her main research area is comparative political economy of development, and her regional focus is on Sub-Saharan Africa. She is interested in the role of the state and business-state relations in economic development, as well as the formation of domestic capitalist classes, how locally owned firms build technological capabilities and why they invest in learning, and how such firms enter and upgrade within global value chains.

She is currently the Principal Investigator on a research project funded by the Danish Social Sciences Research Council called 'Getting out of the Technology Trap: Foreign Direct Investment and Learning among African-owned Firms', AFRICAP for short. For more information, see the project website: www.ruc.dk/africap.

Her previous work examined what drives states in developing countries to implement policies aimed at developing productive sectors in their economies. The findings were published as The Politics of African Industrial Policy: A comparative perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Her other books include: The Politics of Aid: African Strategies for Dealing with Donors (Oxford University Press, 2008), and Turning Points in African Democracy (James Currey, 2009).