Dr Ernest Addison, a former Governor of the Bank of Ghana, has been appointed a Short-Term Senior Research Fellow with the Harvard University Center for International Development and the Center for African Studies.
He will be leading four CID Student seminar sessions in October reflecting on his tenure as Governor of the Bank of Ghana.
After eight years at the helm of Ghana's Central Bank, Dr Addison retired from the Bank of Ghana in March 2025. His tenure was marked by a succession of exceptional situations, including global liquidity with negative interest rates, the global pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine.
In the first half of his tenure, the Bank made major contributions to creditworthiness assessments of the country, which in the context of excess global liquidity allowed Ghana to gain access to international capital markets. One of the rating agencies that signalled strong confidence for global investors singled out monetary policy with particular emphasis on major reforms of Ghana's financial sector.
By the year of the pandemic, Ghana had become the fastest-growing economy in Africa with inflation on a downward trend. Dr Addison was awarded the Sub-Saharan Africa Central Bank Governor of the Year by Global Markets in that year, which cited the tough measures undertaken by the Central Bank that had delivered good prospects.
Ghana had aggressively cleaned up its financial sector with the resolution of nine banks and 347 other financial institutions, put into place a Basel III capital requirements framework and built staff supervisory capacity. By the time the pandemic hit, the country had well-capitalised strong banks with strong buffers. Ghana came out of the pandemic with much stronger growth than many other countries due to the shrewd measures implemented to minimise the impact.
If the successes of the first half of his tenure had been aided by access to global capital markets, the second half was challenged by lack of access to the same global markets in the context of significant debt build-up which had helped ramp up growth. Fiscal policies weakened and the country suffered creditworthiness downgrades that effectively shut it out of the capital markets, triggering a major liquidity and debt crisis.
Working with international partners, the Government put into place major corrective measures including a debt restructuring programme which was politically challenging but effective in creating the necessary fiscal space to return the economy back to stability.