Abstract
Ghana seems to be destined for a bright future. According to the Ministry of Finance of Ghana, poverty fell from 52% of the total population in 1992 to 28.5% in 2006. However, challenges remain. Unfortunately, inequalities sustain and the poorest Ghanaian people do not seem to benefit from economic growth. Analyzed by GINI coefficient, inequalities have significantly risen from 3.373 to 3.394 over the 1992-2006 period. In other words, 18.2% of the population still live with less than US $1/day. Nowadays, economy of Ghana is changing since the UK firm Tullow Oil discovered, in 2007 and 2008 new oil offshore reserves in Tano basin's so called Jubilee Fields. Before this surprising discovery, production of oil in Ghana was negligible. The first oil reserve discovered in the 1970s did not provide the country with significant revenues as they yielded only 226 barrels a day. The production increased to 7,399 b/d in 2008, ranking Ghana as the 91st world's oil producer. Even though the extraction from new oil reserves will start in late 2010, the announcement of the discovery has attracted FDI. Indeed, the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), a state-owned firm which aims to promote the production of 'black gold' since 1989, affirmed on its website that FDI reached US $523 million in September 2008. Accordingly, oil is going to become a significant revenue stream as it has been forecasted to extract three billion barrels of oil. We may thus imagine four different scenarios for Ghana following two axes. The horizontal axe will identify the repartition of oil revenues while the vertical one will represent the global and regional focus.
