Not much has been heard from Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia since the December 2008 elections. The academic, who became a technocrat (rising to become Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana) and a politician as Vice-Presidential candidate of the then ruling New Patriotic Party in the 2008 presidential elections, 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 also become an author, with the publication next month a book titled “Monetary Policy and Financial Sector Reform in Africa: Ghana’s Experience”.

The book undertakes an in-depth review of the practical implementation of monetary policy in Ghana along with the development of the financial sector under different governments since independence. It provides insights into the choice and implementation of monetary policies such as direct controls, monetary targeting, inflation targeting, and financial sector reforms in areas such as the legal and regulatory framework, capital market and money market, banking sector, currency redenomination, the payment system, rural banking, and Ghana’s historic 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 policy regimes and financial sector reforms on the performance of Ghana’s economy? Why are bank lending rates still stubbornly high?

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, The Bretton Woods System, 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 the practice of Monetary Policy in Ghana and therefore represents a major contribution to the study of Monetary Policy in Africa. What would Dr. Bawumia have to say? “Monetary Policy and Financial Sector Reform in Africa: Ghana’s Experience” would be released in October 2010.