The paper, based on archival evidence collected in British and Ghanaian archives, analyses the contribution of economists and statisticians to the task of state-building in Ghana from the late 1920s until 1966. It argues that while in the 1920s and 1930s anthropology was the most relevant among the social sciences to serve the needs of the colonial administration, since the Second World War economists and statisticians became crucial in the task of state formation. The contribution of economics and statistics to state-building was threefold. Firstly, the need for increased and better statistical information to facilitate the task of economic planning led to an expansion of state capacity through the extraction of relevant information. Secondly, the employment of new techniques of macroeconomic accounting based on internationally accepted standards allowed the state to represent the national economy as an object of policy intervention, and legitimise itself. Thirdly, during the last years of Kwame Nkrumah’s rule economic science (in the form of Marxist-Leninist political economy) was employed as a tool of ideological indoctrination. What was a descriptive science became in less than 25 years a tool for deliberately changing the values and beliefs of Ghanaian citizens.