The Complexity of Business-Government Relations in Ghana: Implication for State-Market-Society Nexus

Abstract

The complexity of business-government relations in the globalized economy cannot be underestimated. This is the product of the cross-cutting effects of a long-term policy shift heightened by globalization, coupled with privatization. Central to this, is the emergence of ideologies within the contours of the state-market-society landscape. Ghana’s privatization experience is typical of this major ideological approach to business-government relations. As a qualitative study, this paper adopts unobtrusive content analysis of an empirical study of the privatization of Ashanti Goldfields Company (AGC). This paper argues that Ghana’s adoption of privatization policy has yielded undesirable policy outcomes due to the complexities of the divestiture process which had adverse effect on the state-market-society nexus.