Business, government, and the privatisation of the Ashanti Goldfields Company in Ghana

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Periodical article

Title:	Business, government, and the privatisation of the Ashanti Goldfields Company in Ghana
Author:	Handley, Antoinette
Year:	2007
Periodical:	Canadian Journal of African Studies
Volume:	41
Issue:	1
Pages:	1-37
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Ghana
Subjects:	privatization State-society relationship business mining companies
External link:	https://www.jstor.org/stable/40380185
Abstract:	The privatization of Ashanti Goldfields Company (AGC) was an important part of Ghana's neo-liberal reforms. Privatization is explicitly intended to alter the balance of power between the public and private sector, and the process revealed much about the relationship between the State and the country's business community. A close examination of the process confirms widely-held perceptions of Jerry Rawlings' PNDC (Provisional National Defence Council) government and its reform process as highly State-driven and subject to the personal idiosyncrasies of the country's president. By contrast, John Kufuor's New Patriotic Party (NPP) demonstrated a less equivocal commitment to boosting the role of the private sector in the economy and employed a more routinely institutionalized set of interactions. While the outcome of these processes was sometimes counterintuitive, overall the privatization of AGC is likely to have shifted power out of the hands of the State and into the hands of an international set of shareholders. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French. [Journal abstract]