Financialisation and Poverty Alleviation in Ghana : Myths and Realities

The neoliberal policy response to the crisis in Ghana did not succeed in reversing the economic decline in either the medium or long term. In fact, quite the opposite: rather than undoing the economic decline, Francis Boateng Frimpong argues that these policy prescriptions further weakened the country's ability to develop. This is because the policies intentionally and unintentionally encouraged factors that destabilised the possibility of the real productive assets earning commensurate returns that could facilitate the flow of capital to the real sectors and thus failed to ensure the survival of industrial enterprises. Rising profit in the financial sector incentivised financial capitalists to divert capital into financial assets at the expense of productive investment, further decelerating the pace of real capital accumulation in the country, thereby exacerbating the crisis.