Every Ghanaian remembers 2022. The price of bread, transport, cooking oil, school fees, everything went up at the same time. By the end of that year, Ghana's annual inflation had reached 54.1 percent. Families that had planned carefully found their budgets shattered. The country was in genuine pain.

The instinct of many commentators was to blame global oil prices, the COVID-19 hangover, and the Russia-Ukraine war. These explanations were not entirely wrong. But a compelling new macroeconomic study by two Ghanaian researchers argues that the story of Ghana's inflation is, above all else, a story about the cedi. Not oil. Not global food prices. The cedi.

The study, titled GANRAP Analysis: Gold, Oil, FX and Ghana Inflation (GANRAP standing for Gold and Not only Oil, Rates and Prices), was authored by Emmanuel Awuku Debrah and Benedict Atta Boateng, both pursuing their MSc in Financial Engineering at WorldQuant University. Their research covers 193 monthly data points from January 2010 to January 2026, one of the most rigorous independent analyses of Ghana's macroeconomic transmission channels produced in recent years.

Below is the research work