Bawumia to unveil new book on monetary policy

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Parent Category: Arts, Books & Profiles

Category: Books

Created on Friday, 01 October 2010 00:00

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Bawumia to unveil new book on monetary policy

Not much has been heard from Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia since the December 2008 elections. The academic, who became a technocrat as Deputy Governor of the

Bank of Ghana was selected as vice-presidential candidate to Nana Akufo-Addo in the 2008 presidential election.

He returned to the world of academia after the elections with stints at the University of British Columbia in Canada and currently at the University of Oxford in the UK.

Dr. Bawumia is however set to break his silence and speak volumes with the publication of his book titled "Monetary Policy and Financial Sector Reform in Africa: Ghana's Experience". The book undertakes an indepth review of Ghana's monetary policy regimes since independence: Direct Controls, Monetary Targeting, and Inflation Targeting under different governments (including Nkrumah, NLC, Busia, Acheampong, Rawlings and Kufuor).

Financial sector development and reforms that have taken place alongside the monetary policy regimes are also placed under the microscope. These include regulatory and legal reforms, capital market and money market reforms, banking reforms, currency redenomination reforms, payment system reform, rural banking reforms, and Ghana's debut sovereign bond issue.

Why were these monetary policy regimes and financial sector reforms adopted? What role did the political economy play in the reforms and outcomes? What was the impact of the different monetary regimes and financial sector reforms on the performance of Ghana's economy?

Dr. Bawumia's "Monetary Policy and Financial Sector Reform in Africa: Ghana's Experience" provides a detailed and chronological account of these issues in the context of developments in the global economic system such as the Great Depression, Keynesianism, Monetarism, The Washington Consensus and Structural Adjustment, HIPC, and the recent global financial crisis.

What are the lessons for Ghana and Africa?

As one of the recent architects of monetary policy and financial sector reform in Ghana, as an academic and as someone with some experience in the world of politics, Dr. Bawumia would be bringing quite a unique perspective to the analysis and discussion of this subject matter.

The book is the first comprehensive text on Monetary Policy in Ghana and therefore represents a major contribution to the study of Monetary Policy in Africa. The book tells the entire story of monetary policy from independence and makes interesting reading even for people who have never studied economics.

Source: Myjoyonline.com