The desire for a transformative change in the structure of the Ghanaian economy dates back to the immediate post-independence period. 1 Unfortunately, the pace of structural transformation has been rather slow, and largely characterized by fairly stagnant manufacturing value-added and employment shares. In the past two decades, there seems to have been renewed hope that the country can get on to a path of higher growth and transformation, and in a way that is inclusive. Inclusive growth here is used to refer to a situation where economic growth is beneficial to all, including the poor. This renewed optimism is based on the fact that, generally, economic growth in Ghana over the past two decades has been good, averaging over 6 per cent annually. Also, the start of oil production in 2010 gave added hope that the country will have increased resources to support the structural transformation efforts.
Ghana’s growth and poverty reduction success has been well documented (see Osei and Jedwab 2017; Aryeetey and Baah-Boateng 2015). However, inequality in Ghana remains a challenge and has been increasing since the early 1990s (Cooke et al. 2016; Atta-Ankomah et al. 2020). On the one hand, this could actually be consistent with Kuznets’s hypothesis, where, in the early years of a country’s development, growth is associated with increased inequality (Huang et al. 2012). On the other hand, this may suggest that structural transformation of the economy may have been rather weak, and characterized by growth that is not inclusive.
