It’s Not Only About Value for Money: Evolution and Development of SOEs and the Making of State-Led Economic Development in Ghana

This chapter conceptualizes state-owned enterprises (SOEs) as colonial relics used as political, economic, developmental, and even punitive and coercive policy instruments and commercial entities. These SOEs were used to advance a developmental agenda and to prosecute the policies of the state. The point of departure in this study is that contemporary research on this subject tends to adopt a narrow conceptualization predicated on “private is better” claims and, subsequently, value for money. Such a restrictive approach, as argued, narrowly limits SOEs’ organizational performance to the three Es, efficiency, efficacy, and economy, while marginalizing heterogeneous environmental contingency factors (social, political/administrative culture) and circumventing critical governance concerns such as accountability and transparency. There is therefore the need to re-examine how these competing arguments and ideas are either addressed or ignored in SOE reform, management, and governance programme. The chapter uses the complexities involved in the SOE development and reform programme in Ghana to argue that the only reason SOEs, especially those not financially profitable, continue to exist is because of their nation-building roles, not economic viability.