African Development • 22 Feb 2022 Will PAPSS save AfCFTA? On 14th January 2022, the Pan African Payments Settlement System (PAPSS) launched in Accra. In addition to six West African central banks, mainly from the mainly Anglophone WAMZ region, Afreximbank (the lead sponsor) and the AfCFTA Secretariat, a number of important governments and corporations graced the event to signal their... read more
Political Governance • 16 Feb 2022 Ghana Must Save ICAO from this ePassport Fiasco In the 24 hours since my comment on the e-Passport controversy, more information, especially a video of the key ceremony in Montreal, has emerged to show that the situation is even crazier than initially thought. It is clear from the video that the ICAO officials who received the Ghanaian delegation... read more
Political Governance • 15 Feb 2022 The Bizarre Controversy over Ghana’s “e-Passport” The first time I read Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian, I laughed and said to myself, “the eminent economist has probably never met a Ghanaian in his life!” My reaction was tongue in cheek, however, since Professor Sen’s main thesis is not that Indians just love arguing for arguing sake,... read more
International Political Economy • 10 Feb 2022 PS: Sovereign Rating Bias Against Africa Ghana’s recent downgrading by Moody’s and the country’s angry response has triggered a flurry of commentary about the broader issue of bias in the ratings issued for African countries by three large Western corporations. I recently wrote a piece that sought to look at the matter comprehensively. But judging by... read more
Macroeconomic Governance • 9 Feb 2022 Are Rating Agencies Out to Get Ghana? This afternoon, Evans Mensah, News Editor and Head of the Political Desk at Joy, a subsidiary of Ghanaian media giant, Multimedia, reached out to discuss the topic he was planning for his PM Express show tonight. He wanted to look at the Ghanaian government’s aggressive response to a decision by... read more
Political Economy • 3 Feb 2022 Should Ghana Go to the IMF? From a serious policymaking point of view, the question as to whether “Ghana should go to the IMF” is not a complete, or particularly meaningful, one. The IMF has many product lines, designed for different purposes, so the more appropriate questions are: Should Ghana go for a/some IMF product(s)/program(s)? If... read more
