ETD

• GDP - Gross Domestic Product IMF - Int

Macroeconomic variables such as government expenditure , interest rate, exchange rate, trade, inflation rates, unemployment, foreign direct investment and imports of goods and services have proven to be very volatile over time in Ghana and do have potential impacts on the growth of manufacturing firms. This scientific research thus seeks to unravel the causal relationships between some of these crucial macroeconomic indicators and their impact on the growth of manufacturing firms in Ghana. The growth of firms here is basically evaluated in terms of the manufacturing value added as a % of GDP though many research have often focused on real GDP as measure of growth. Manufacturing firms operating in the industrial sector of Ghana is our main focus here as the majority of firms in Ghana fall under this sector though GDP growth rates of manufacturing firms varies with other subrelated sectors like mining and construction. Some of the crucial macroeconomic indicators being explored in this work includes labour force, government expenditure, real effective exchange rate and trade variable as a % of GDP. The major sources of data of this work was secondary data and were obtained from world bank site and the Ghana Statistical service website. The data gathered for econometric analysis are a set of time series and spanned the period from 1990 to 2014.The ordinary least square method was employed with the use of Gretl software for obtaining our estimated co-efficient and the entire econometric analysis was performed in a multiple regression model. Based on the findings, it is recommended that the government of Ghana should should adopt some prudent macroeconomic policies in order to ensure that manufacuting firms experience a surge in growth