When Literacy Matters: A Study of the Impact of English and Local Language Literacy on Income in Ghana

Ghana is a country with substantial language heterogeneity. In 2002, Ghana began a nationwide policy instituting English as the primary language of instruction in grade school. Using data from the Ghana Living Standards Survey, this paper examines the conditions (sectoral, geographic, educational attainment) in which English language literacy is, in fact, beneficial. Implementing a multinomial logit first stage to capture sector selection, this paper explores the interaction of sector and language on income in Ghana