US$6.1bn MSME financing gap in Ghana …Commercial banks in quandary amid DDEP

ByKeun Lee

about 55% over a ve-year horizon,” they wrote. “Discussions with holders of foreign currency instruments are continuing.”

Ghana has been engaging investors since late last year to restructure about $30 billion of its $46 billion in local and international debt. It recently completed the rst part of a domestic restructuring, with investors exchanging 83 billion cedis ($6.7 billion), or 64% of holdings, for new securities, against an overall target of 80%.

It aims to start “substantive” dis-

Industrial policy has returned to government agendas across the developed and developing world. While the US In ation Reduction Act has shocked America’s Asian and European trading partners, the Biden administration’s signature climate-change legislation is just the latest in a series of recent policies that seemingly y in the face of World Trade Organization rules. after all, underpinned East Asia’s “economic miracle” between the 1960s and 1990s.

Political scientist Chalmers Johnson attributed Japan’s postwar economic boom to the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, which dominated Japanese policymaking from 1949 to 2000.

Similarly, economist Alice Amsden argued that South Korea’s transformation into an economic powerhouse relied on subsidies and tari s that encouraged the formation of giant, state-backed industrial conglomerates.

Despite the contributions of industrial policy to the East

Asian growth miracle, the rise of neoliberal economics in the West made it taboo there. That began to change in 2008, however, as the global nancial crisis created a seemingly insatiable appetite for government intervention. Faced with a rapidly growing China and a looming climate catastrophe, economist Mariana Mazzucato and others have reimagined industrial policy as a way to achieve a mission-orient-