Dual transition is a combination of economic and political development. Okome (1999), for instance, observes that the actors involved in the politics of Nigerian economic policy-making, during its dual transition program, could be classified into two main categories. One set of forces, she says, was external but relevant to the reproduction of the economy, and the other was domestic and located within the state, economy and society. The external forces include the private international creditors organized in the London Club and the official creditors organized in the Paris Club, the IMF and the World Bank. They recommend Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) as the "ideal solution" to the problem of balance of payments crises and indebtedness. The domestic forces, in contrast, included the various sectors, classes and associations, as well as the state elite, who are prone to the same cleavages that divide society. Okome concluded that the domestic forces are divided between the opponents and supporters of SAP.9 In Ghana, the political wrangling between the PNDC-led government of Rawlings and other political organizations almost derailed the movement toward economic reform and democracy during the 1980s and 1990s. It didn't occur. In Nigeria it did, so there may be lessons for Nigeria (and other African states) in Ghana's experience.
There is no agreement on the nature of the relationship between economic and political reforms. In the case of Ghana, it is not clear why the dual transition program embarked upon in the 1980s and early 1990s failed or succeeded. Nonetheless, the dual transition program put in place by the PNDC-led government of Rawlings would stay the course and yield some good results. Under a committee headed by Kwesi Botchwey, a Harvard-educated lawyer, the government outlined and submitted a four-year Economic Recovery Program (ERP) in 1983.

According to Leith and Lofchie (1993), among the reasons the Rawlings government chose to proceed with an official policy of structural adjustment was the fact that so many of Ghana's domestic prices, including those paid by government agencies, had already risen to reflect scarcity in the price of foreign exchange. The excess demand pressure for foreign exchange under the previous regime, they observed, was bottled up by quantitative restrictions on imports and delayed international trade payments. Furthermore, the domestic prices of most imports reflected the scarcity of foreign exchange rather than the official exchange rate. Devaluation would mean that the official local currency price of foreign exchange would rise toward the scarcity value of foreign exchange, but the scarcity value of foreign exchange would be unaffected in the short run. The de facto price adjustments that preceded official adjustments, they argued, also paved the way for an official change of policy, and devaluation would not have changed the price structure of importable goods, whose prices had already increased in the market place to reflect the diminished real value of the cedi (the Ghanaian currency).10