University of Ghana PhD Candidate Awarded Prestigious Warwick Africa Hub Visiting Fellowship

Michael Kofi Hanson, a PhD candidate in Development Economics at the Department of Economics, University of Ghana, has been awarded the prestigious Africa Hub Visiting PhD Fellowship at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. He will undertake a ten-month, fully funded research fellowship at Warwick from October 2026 to July 2027, under the academic mentorship of Prof. Samuel Obeng (PhD).

The Warwick Africa Hub Visiting PhD Fellowship is an initiative of the University of Warwick that provides outstanding PhD students registered at African universities with opportunities to access research facilities, academic networks, and other resources that can contribute to the advancement of their doctoral research and future career development. The fellowship also seeks to strengthen research collaboration between academics at Warwick and partner institutions across Africa.

Michael’s doctoral research examines how fiscal transfers, local government incentives, population dynamics and taxpayer behaviour interact to shape fiscal capacity, provision of social services and the broader state effectiveness within Ghana’s decentralised governance system. The research builds on his earlier work on Ghana’s District Assemblies Common Fund (DACF) and is being developed into an integrated three-paper doctoral thesis.

The first paper adopts a diagnostic perspective to examine how intergovernmental fiscal transfers influence local revenue mobilisation and expenditure performance across Ghanaian districts, including whether these relationships vary across demographic and district-characteristic contexts while accounting for the extent of District Assembly Common Fund mismanagement (DMI: DACF Mismanagement Index - a novel index created for this purpose). The second paper extends the analysis by examining how conditional transfers based on performance regarding own-source revenue generation, population dynamics, and demographic change shape not only local fiscal capacity, but also the provision of social services across districts. The third paper introduces a behavioural dimension by investigating the interactions between fiscal policy, transfers, and property taxpayer behaviour. 

Through the fellowship, Michael hopes to strengthen the theoretical, empirical, and methodological foundations of his doctoral research and benefit from sustained engagement with researchers and the wider academic community at the University of Warwick. He also looks forward to participating in research seminars, accessing advanced research and training opportunities, developing his three doctoral papers towards publication, and building lasting academic collaborations.

The Fellowship represents an important opportunity to advance a research agenda that moves beyond conventional analyses of fiscal transfers and local revenue mobilisation by incorporating the demographic, social service provision, and behavioural dimensions of fiscal decentralisation. Ultimately, Michael’s research seeks to generate policy-relevant evidence on how Ghana’s system of intergovernmental finance can become more responsive to differences across districts, strengthen local fiscal capacity, improve the provision of social services, and contribute to more effective decentralised governance and state effectiveness.