Ghana’s Economic Decline and Development Strategies

Abstract

Ghana’s political and economic decline is traceable in part at least to the partial delinkage of the 1980s. Contrary to current thought on this subject, however, in this instance the process was not a Third World initiated strategy of ‘transformation’ (i.e. a reduction of Third World states’ connections with Western international capitalism)¹ but rather a steady withdrawal of Western interest in and concern over what the West has come to view as a strategically and economically peripheral country. The recession in the developed countries in the 1980s has led to a decrease in production, entailing less demand for commodities produced by Third World exporters. Tenuous business and financial linkages with Western capitalism have grown weaker as Western-based multinational companies and their governments have pulled back from entangling investments, aid and debt relief programmes in the less stable and strategically unimportant parts of the Third World. Multilateral lending agencies, the logical stopgap, appear somewhat hesitant and aloof — all too parsimonious with their funds and at times insensitive in the conditions they set for the loans they offer. In the face of this partial delinkage by the Western core, states at the periphery, such as Ghana, feel dependent yet neglected, vulnerable while lacking choice, and all this at a time when the world economy seems to be headed into a major crisis of uncertain proportions.

We need time to reduce our need of the IMF, by seeking alternative ways of production. Small is good, at least for us.

(Flt-Lt Jerry John Rawlings, Observer, 13 Feb. 1983, p. 11)