Marketing in Southern Ghana: towards a planning typology

There are a number of strong historical and practical grounds for a regional planner operating in Southern Ghana to study marketing structures. The recent history of the area confirms an important axiom of regional theory, namely that the organisation of marketing has a considerable influence on the pattern of settlement that emerges in a given region. It is true that by 1970 the spatial structure of the Central Region was being influenced far more by the marketing of local foodstuffs than by the cocoa marketing and distribution of imported goods that had dominated the earlier periods. The commodities involved had changed, but the overall importance of marketing as an organising principle could not be questioned.