Living standards in pre-independent Ghana: evidence from household budgets

Eric Gaisie

No 7, HHB Working Papers Series from The Historical Household Budgets Project

Abstract:

Poor living standards among indigenous residents have been cited as one of the main factors that motivated Africans to forcefully push for political independence from colonial rule during the first half of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, there has been limited evidence to back this assertion especially with personal welfare with reference often made to national level indicators. This article dwells on household budgets to provide empirical information about the living conditions of indigenous residents in Ghana prior to independence. In addition to a thorough analysis of the socio-economic conditions prevailing at the time, poverty measurements are made to estimate the incidence, depth and severity of poverty in the country in the 1950s.

Keywords: Accra; Ghana; household budgets; independence; living standards; poverty; poverty line (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 I32 N37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2017-04-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://papers.hhbproject.com/media/workingpapers/7_EGaisie.pdf 7_EGaisie.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to papers.hhbproject.com:80 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hbu:wpaper:7

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HHB Working Papers Series from The Historical Household Budgets Project
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giuliana Freschi ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).