Honors Theses
Date of Award
Fall 5-13-2023
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
Croft Institute for International Studies
First Advisor
Joshua First
Second Advisor
Zachary Kagan Guthrie
Third Advisor
Patrick Lewis
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
Supranational organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the European Union (EU) have impressed market liberalizing policies upon developing countries for decades in efforts to stabilize their economies and introduce them to global markets. While these programs and the resulting popular scholarly debates are typically geared toward macroeconomic indicators, the way those policies affect industries on the micro level has been somewhat overlooked, especially when considering how such policy over time could affect an individual industry. This thesis studies how supranational organizations such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the EU contribute to the decline of small-scale, domestically focused industries by studying the Ghanaian tomato industry’s experience with the IMF and World Bank led Economic Recovery Program (ERP) and the EU led Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA). It is theorized that by utilizing their positions as powerful actors in the global economic sphere, the IMF, the World Bank, and the EU have successfully promoted policy that has been very influential in diminishing the ability of the Ghanaian tomato industry to compete within domestic and international markets. The study found that the ERP led to the closing of three tomato factories that had been crucial to the livelihoods of many Ghanaian farmers and that the effects of the EPA that followed priced the farmers out of markets that soon became flooded with foreign tomatoes and EU-subsidized tomato paste.
Recommended Citation
Wilcox, Kaci, "When God Gives You Tomatoes, Don't Import them from Italy: A Case Study on the Impact of Supranational Institutional Policy on the Ghanaian Tomato Industry" (2023). Honors Theses. 3024.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/3024
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