This paper examines the choice of health care and progressivity of health care services in Ghana. Using a combination of benefit incidence analysis and a discrete choice model and data from the Ghana Living Standards Survey, our results give clear evidence of progressivity with consistent ordering: postnatal and prenatal services are the most progressive, followed by clinic visits, and then hospital visits. Child health care services are more progressive than adult. Own price and income elasticities are higher for public health care than private health care and for adults than children. Poorer households are substantially more price responsive than wealthy ones, implying that fee increases for public health care will impact negatively on equity in health care. Simulations show the importance of opportunity costs in health care decisions and suggest that reforms that focus only on out-of-pocket expenses will have a limited ability to extend public health care to all potential users.

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This paper examines the incidence of public education subsidies in Ghana. Since the late 1990s, Ghana's government has increasingly recognised human capital as a cornerstone to alleviating poverty and income inequality, causing dramatic increases of government expenditures to the education sector. At the same time user fees have been introduced in higher education while basic education is being made progressively free. The question then is, whether these spending increases have been effective in reaching the poor and to what extent? What factors influence the poor's participation in the public school system? We attempt to address these issues, employing the standard benefit incidence methods and the willingness-to-pay method using a nested multinomial logit model. The results give a clear evidence of progressivity with consistent ordering: preschooling and primary schooling are the most progressive, followed by secondary, and then tertiary. The poorest quintile gains 14.8% of total education benefits in 2005 compared to the richest quintile benefit of 26.3%. Own price and income elasticities are higher for private schools than public schools and for secondary than basic schools.

The paper investigates how macro-economic factors affect Stock Market development in Ghana using the Johansen's cointegration procedure. Quarterly data from 1991 to 2004 was used and the paper made very useful observations. First, the paper finds that gross domestic savings causes stock market development. A related finding is that real income, gross domestic savings, domestic credit to the private sector, and exchange rate predict the long run development of the Ghana Stock exchange. However, Treasury bill rates have negative impact on the long run development of the GSE. Contrary to expectation, inflation did not prove to be a significant factor in predicting the long run development of the stock market.