Crude Oil Discovery and Economic Development in Ghana (2015-2025)

Abstract This paper examines the relationship between crude oil discovery and economic development in Ghana from 2015 to 2025, a decade marked by the maturation of Ghana's petroleum sector following the 2007 Jubilee Field discovery. While Ghana established robust legislative frameworks including the Petroleum Revenue Management Act and the Petroleum Commission Act to avert the "resource curse," the anticipated transformative development outcomes remain partially unrealized. This work aim to to examine the impact of crude oil discovery and production on Ghana’s overall economic development and to identify the challenges that hinders sustainable economic development through crude oil production in Ghana. The study adopts the Developmental State Theory as its analytical framework, justified by its emphasis on state autonomy, bureaucratic effectiveness, and strategic intervention in steering resource revenues toward productive economic transformation. This theoretical lens moves beyond good governance prescriptions to interrogate how state capacity and elite commitment shape developmental outcomes, particularly relevant for understanding Ghana's experience where formal institutions exist alongside implementation challenges. The research relies on secondary sources including academic literature, policy documents, and media reports. The work find out that despite comprehensive legislation, petroleum revenues have been disproportionately allocated to recurrent expenditure rather than productive investments, limiting structural transformation and the 2025 amendment to the Petroleum Revenue Management Act, which redirected all Annual Budget Funding Amount resources to infrastructure while removing the Public Interest and Accountability Committee's independent funding, represents a centralizing tendency that may weaken oversight . The study concludes that Ghana's oil-led development trajectory reflects the characteristics of its political settlement rather than purely institutional design. The work recommends insulating petroleum revenue management from political discretion, strengthening PIAC's independence, and establishing binding long-term development frameworks aligned with the Developmental State ethos of strategic, transformative investment.