ABSTRACT
In 1957, when Ghana, the then Gold Coast and once Britain's "model colony" (Austin, 1964:3), attained political independence (the first Black African country to do so), the general mood was that an irreversible process of socioeconomic and political development was about to unfold. The Ghanaian economy at this time no doubt bore the major hallmarks of the so-called developing countries: an agricultural economy with the production of a single primary commodity whose world price was subject
to fluctuations, the extraction of few minerals for exports, limited manufacturing activities, high illiteracy and poverty, etc. Being a poor and relatively small country, Ghana also depended on international trade for the importation of much of the commercial and technological goods critical for socioeconomic development. It is in this respect that the early development economists who assessed Ghana's economy characterized it as "fragile" (cf. Kay, 1972).
