Showing papers on "Foreign-exchange reserves published in 1971"

Military Officers and Political Leadership: The Ghanaian Case

Abstract: The literature on military intervention in the so-called developing areas poses, and attempts to answer, two general questions: first, what the causes of military interventions in the politics of modernizing countries are; and second, what effects such interventions have on the processes of modernization and political development. In this article I shall deal with these questions in relation to a single empirical case-the West African state of Ghana. I shall reformulate the second question to some extent in my discussion, inquiring what three and a half years of military rule have revealed about the political leadership capabilities of the Ghanaian military regime in tackling the twin problems of economic and political development. The economic situation facing the military upon their assumption of power in Ghana on February 24, 1966, was dismal, The Gross National Product had been stagnant over the previous five-year period, with only a .7 percent overall growth in real GNP per capita between 1960 and 1965, including a decline in real GNP per capita of 2.1 percent between 1964 and 1965.' There was an adverse balance of payments situation and a concomitant shortage of foreign reserves. The foreign debt was large and payment on the bulk of it was short-term, 51 percent being payable within five years. Douglas Scott, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, has estimated that Ghana's foreign debt servicing structure was among the worst in the world at that time.2 Inflation was another persistent problem, the national retail price index having practically doubled in the decade 1955-65.3 The labor market was characterized