While Ghana has been hailed as a democratic success story, its state institutions have a mixed record and the latest governance indicators suggest their improvement has plateaued or even declined slightly. However, amidst the general weakness of the Ghanaian public bureaucracy, evidence from several datasets as well as findings from a recent expert survey we conducted show that the two key institutions responsible for stimulating growth and maintaining macroeconomic stability – namely the Bank of Ghana and the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Ghana – have maintained a high degree of performance during the past three decades, albeit with substantial variations across different ruling coalitions. In this paper, we address three related questions: why and how have these two financial institutions maintained their relative effectiveness in the performance of their core mandated functions? What roles have internal political dynamics and external processes/actors (e.g. donors) played in this? What accounts for the substantial variations in the relative effectiveness of these institutions across different ruling coalitions?