Economies after Colonialism

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).

• 1. Ghanaian political economy and the politics of industrial policy; 2. Origins of competitive clientelism and weak domestic capitalists; 3. Return to competitive clientelism in the fourth republic; 4. Economic growth, but maintaining the colonial trading economy; 5. Challenges to diversifying exports: accessing global markets and learning to learn; 6. Challenges to modernizing agro-processing: struggles over inputs, organizing smallholders, and enforcing contracts; 7. NPP government and the not so 'Golden Age of Business'; 8. NDC II Government and managing the new oil wealth.

'This important book, which synthesizes the large Ghana scholarship as well as using lots of original research by the author, makes a strong case for the country monograph and the generation of new knowledge about actually existing societies through serious, long-term fieldwork. At the same time, its comparative and theoretical relevance is much broader: as a companion volume to the influential The Politics of Industrial Policy in Africa, it clearly outlines the difficulties of transforming African states in a context of competitive clientelism and weak domestic capitalists. A must read for all interested in African political economy, the politics of development, and debates about economic diversification more generally.' Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, University of Oxford