ABSTRACT
As we started writing this chapter, on June 5, 2009, petrol and diesel prices in Ghana jumped 30% at the pump overnight—a consequence of the recently elected new government removing the implicit fuel subsidy. 1 Soon after, public transport prices increased far out of proportion to the increased fuel costs. Food price increases were predicted to follow. The initial reaction on the radio and in the newspapers was one of outrage. One commentator asked despairingly what had happened to the pro-poor policies that the government had promised. The opposition parties used the price increase as an excuse to chide the government for harming the poor. Over the course of the week, the responses became more nuanced, as increasingly people started to talk about the distributional impact of the fuel subsidy and its subsequent removal. However, even several months after the increase in fuel prices, headlines bemoaning the price increase continued to crop up in the newspapers.
