Economies after Colonialism

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.

Author Biography

Lindsay Whitfield is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde Universitet, Denmark. She is the author of The Politics of African Industrial Policy: A Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 2015), The Politics of Aid: African Strategies for Dealing with Donors (2008), and Turning Points in African Democracy (2008). She is also the current co-editor of African Affairs (one of the leading journals in African studies).