A Country That Never Sleeps? A Web Scrapping Analysis of the 24‐h Economy Policy in Ghana

ABSTRACT In light of revitalizing Ghana's economic landscape through sustainable job creation underpinned by 24‐h operations across all key sectors, the National Democratic Congress proposed the ‘24‐h economy’ policy proposal. This study employs the web‐scraping technique through text mining and python codes to analyse 1820 comments from Facebook, X and YouTube platforms from 18th November, 2023 to 31st August 2024. “Ghanaian economy”, “Night shift” and “Energy costs” were the most frequently discussed topics, with more neutral comments dominating positive and negative remarks about the policy. The comments are more polarized towards topics like “Ghanaian economy”, “Night shift” and “Energy costs”, with the least polarized comments towards “policy impact”. The heatmap shows that “Ghanaian Economy”, “Economic Plan” and “Job Creation” are strongly correlated. For cluster analysis, “Visionary Leadership,” “Night Workers,” “Energy Costs,” and “Night Shift” are clustered very closely together, suggesting that they have similar sentiment polarities. On the contrary, “Ghanaian Economy” and “Job Creation” form another distinct cluster but are positioned slightly further apart. “Policy Impact” and “Economic Plan” form their branch but are separate from other topics. “Energy costs”, “Economic plan” and “24‐h economy” had 85.73% degree of centrality in the open online deliberation, which should not be overlooked in the execution of the policy. It is recommended that the government adopts an evidence‐based plan that defines priority sectors, specifies phased implementation timelines and outlines measurable employment targets disaggregated by region and gender. Additionally, the government should introduce a well‐structured Time‐of‐Use electricity tariff for industrial and agro‐processing firms.