Misrepresenting occurrences and personalities in Ghana, 1979-1983: A comment on Frank Gerits' incorrect and misleading claims

Frank Gerits’s article contains several misrepresentations and false claims about events and personalities in Ghana during the turbulent years of 1979 through 1983.  The most serious of these are his treatments of Flt. Lt. Jerry Rawlings and Dr. Kwesi Botchwey.  Gerits ignores Rawlings’s own explanations for his actions and misrepresents Botchwey’s arguments in two essays.   The important lessons for economic policy formulation and governance in the Third World to be learned from the painful experiences Ghanaians went through in those years are distorted by Gerits’s attempting to craft an interpretive perspective he calls “anticolonial capitalism” or “anticolonial liberation.”   My comment clarifies. &nbsp

Rethinking about Determinants of Inflation in Ghana: Which Econometric Model Tell the True Story

This study examines the factors that influence inflation in Ghana over the sample period of 1965-2012, using the Bayesian Model Selection (BMS) techniques to address issues of model uncertainty. Using data from the world development indictors, the study found real output growth, population growth rate, broad money, exchange rate, lending rate and budget deficit as some of the key factors contributing to Ghana’s inflation. The study recommends among others Bank of Ghana to adopt a low official interest rate as it has a transmission mechanism. JEL Code: E32, E37 Keywords: Bayesian Model Selection, Ghana, Inflatio

Financial Development and Economic Growth among Arab Maghreb Countries: Dynamic Panel Model Analysis

This paper examine the short and the long run elasticities and the link between financial development and economic growth in Arab Maghreb countries. Using credit to private sector, foreign direct investment and domestic savings as a proxy for financial development. The study adopts Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) technique with data from World Development Indicators (1970-2012).The results reveals positive relationship between financial development and economic growth. Also, reveals that improvement in financial indicators has the same impact on economic growth in both the long and the short-run. Keywords: Arab Maghreb union, Economic growth, financial development

Parental expectations and school enrolment decisions: Evidence from rural Ghana

We use field data to investigate factors which influence parents’ decision to enrol children in schools in rural Ghana. The empirical results identified a host of socio-economic and household-level factors including remittances parents expect from investing in education, parents perception of a child's desirable professions, cost of schooling and discount rate as significant determinants of parental school enrolment decision. When gender of the child and remittances are taken into account, we show male parents are more likely to invest in education of boys than girls because they expect significantly higher returns from their investment in boys. Female parents do not show such gender preference. The proportion of children enrolled in school is positively related to average cost of schooling for male parents Gender of parent plays a significant role in school enrolment decision making

Firm Capacity Utilization in Ghana: Does Foreign Ownership Matter?

One major policy change that has driven enterprise development in Ghana over the past two decades has been the opening of the sector to private and foreign participation. Using firm-level cross-sectional data for on Ghanaian enterprises for the year 2006 within an endogenous switching regression model, we analyze the question whether enterprises with high foreign ownership concentration exhibit different levels of capacity utilization from domestically owned firms. It was found that firms that choose to engage foreign partners have higher capacity utilization than a random firm from the sample would have and those who engage more domestic partners do no better or worse than a random firm from the sample. Other findings suggest that the level of demand, capital-labour ratio, wage productivity, and labour productivity are significant determinants of capacity utilisation. Increasing openness to foreign participation and allowing firms more flexibility to make factor choices by reducing strict labor regulations can positively affect capacity utilization. Keywords: capacity utilization, firm ownership, endogenous switching regressio

Determinants of Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa: The case of Ghana

This paper assesses the determinants of economic growth in Ghana during the period 1970-2012 by making use of the Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) in order to address the issue of model uncertainty. Making use of the Markov Chain Monte Carlo Model composition (MC)3 for model selections, the results of the empirical analysis show the importance of variables such as current account balance, inflation rate and population growth as well as the role of the dual economy in driving economic growth in Ghana. These results show that economic growth policy in Ghana should not be confined within a specific growth theory, be it neoclassical and Keynesian. The results are robust with the change of model priors in the context of the BMA analysis

Currency depreciation and the monetary adjustment process: Reconsidering Lord King's contributions

© Oxford University Press 2018, All rights reserved. This paper investigates Lord King's contributions in light of the renewed debate on international monetary policy coordination. We argue that King's work contains refined bullionist insights concerning currency depreciation, exchange rate determination, and balance of payments adjustment. We show how King's analysis of the monetary process under different currency regimes can help elucidate the effects of unconventional monetary policy on a global scale, concerning monetary spillovers, currency wars, business cycles, and the distribution of wealth

Market structure and profit performance of Banks in Sierra Leone: Market structure and profit performance of Banks in Sierra Leone

The study examines the effects of market structure on profitability in the Sierra Leone banking industry. There are two competing hypotheses—the traditional structure–conduct–performance (SCP) hypothesis and the efficiency hypothesis (EH). Using pooled and quarterly data for the period 2006-2011, this study tests the validity of these two hypotheses. In general, the overall results of the study have been mixed. However, capital to asset ratio and expenses to asset ratio are found to influence their performance. But for definitive policy purposes, the impact of the banking structure needs to be explored further