of Nkrumah's inefficient state enterprises and ill-advised experiment in state socialism, "after the mid-1960s, the economy stagnated, characterized by weak commodity demand, outmoded equipment, overvalued currency, smuggling and foreign debt" (xxi).
By the late 1960s, Ghana's relationships with the West generally were strained because it saw little purpose in subsidizing a regime which was mismanaged internally and which played an active role in playing the West against the East. In 1966, Nkrumah was overthrown by a military coup d'etat. However, the economic situation continued to worsen until the early 1980s under a succession of unstable regimes.
In May 1979 Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings led a successful coup and was firmly in control of the country in 1982 after a brief departure from power. For nearly a decade, Rawlings ruled through an authoritarian political structure called the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC). After 1983, Rawlings decisively arrested Ghana's drift to the left and instituted a structural adjustment, or Economic Recovery Program. The key features of that program, which was more or less imposed on Ghana by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as the price exacted for the extension of further international credit, were the reduction of the role of the state in economic affairs, monetary and fiscal restraint, and resort to free market incentives and private investment, primarily foreign, to expand export earnings.
Ghana's economic condition has substantially improved since the mid-1980s. The negative growth rates of the period between 1960 and 1981 were reversed. Average per capita per annum real growth rates between 1985 and 1995 were 4.4 per cent per annum (Europa International Yearbook 1997 1442). Inflation was in high double digits in some years but came down to about 20 percent in the mid-90s. Foreign debt remained high, however, about $5 billion in the mid-90s, and B...