At the centre of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness is the idea of country ownership. It is meant to change the situation in many aid dependent African countries where donors dominate decision-making over which policies are adopted, how aid is spent, and what conditions are attached to...

Everyone knows that aid is not working as intended, and that something must change. The big question is how to change the status quo. The current international aid debate is characterized by dichotomies and over-simplified generalizations. In order to push the debate forward and identify...

For the sake of less developed countries, it is time to adjust the discourses of international development assistance on poverty reduction. This article attempts to do so by reviewing new and old literature explaining why some countries are rich and others are poor. History has repeatedly shown...

The nascent Ghanaian horticulture export sector, which emerged in the mid-1980s, has been ignored by ruling elites, especially after the return to multiparty democracy in 1993. Ruling elites across the two party governments between 1993 and 2008 did not actively pursue initiatives to support the...

Since the Fourth Republic was inaugurated in 1993, politics in Ghana has been increasingly characterized by competitive clientelism. Ruling coalitions are characterized by a high degree of vulnerability in power due to a strong opposition party, by strong lower-level factions within the ruling...

Ghana has exhibited rather strong economic growth since the 1980s, but little transformation of the productive structure of its economy. The paper argues that ruling elites' policy choices are shaped by their political survival strategies. In turn, these strategies are shaped by (1) the...

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...