12. International Trade

This chapter and the next provide an overview of Ghana’s place in the evolving international economy focussing particularly on the period since the mid-1980s, but giving some additional data for earlier years which supplement that in the 1989 edition of this book. The adoption of the Economic Recovery Programme in 1983, and the series of economic policy adjustments which occurred in the following years, changed Ghana’s relationship with the global economy radically. Many aspects of the economic policy regime which existed prior to 1983 made Ghana’s economy unsustainable in the absence of significant changes. Some of the data presented in this chapter relates to the earlier period, and more detailed discussion of this earlier period is to be found in Huq (1989, chapters 10 and 11). It can be noted that Oduro (2000) reviews Ghana’s external trade experience between 1970 and 1996 in an illuminating review.