Anmerkungen:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments May 25, 2023 erstellt
Beschreibung:
Ghana’s economy was identical to South Korea’s economy in the 1960s. Since the 1970s, however, Ghana’s economy has substantially lagged. To explain Ghana’s poor long-run economic growth, we build a neoclassical growth model to primarily examine the role of Ghana’s barriers to physical capital accumulation, which is often neglected due to a lack of data. We found that physical capital barriers explain about 10 percent of Ghana’s poor long-run economic growth relative to South Korea from 1970 to 2014. By recalibrating our model to Ghana’s recent macroeconomic data, we found that a reduction in Ghana’s physical capital barriers by almost half (from 0.7 to 0.4) increased Ghana’s real-GDP-per-worker growth rate by about 2.7 and 0.82 percentage points over the periods 2020-2029 and 2030-2049 respectively. Comparably, we found that the policy of reducing Ghana’s physical capital barriers was superior to the policy of raising Ghana’s human capital growth rate (by a realiistic amount) over the short-to-medium term. Overall, our paper sheds some light on the extent of Ghana’s barriers to physical capital accumulation and highlights the need for policy interventions that prioritize the removal of these barriers over the accumulation of human capital