Which country rebuilt from poorer than Ghana to a top-15 economy?

South Korea. In 1960 its income per head was below Ghana's and comparable to the poorest countries in Africa, after a colonial occupation and a war that flattened most of its industry and killed perhaps a tenth of the population. It is now among the fifteen largest economies in the world, and the transformation took a single lifetime.

How it was done is genuinely disputed rather than a simple story of free markets. The state directed credit to chosen exporters, protected them at home while forcing them to compete abroad, and withdrew support from those that failed - and much of it happened under a military dictatorship, with the democratic transition only in 1987. Economists still argue about how much of the growth was because of the industrial policy and how much despite it.

The cultural export was not planned and has become one of the most striking parts. Government support for creative industries from the late 1990s was a modest programme aimed at a domestic slump; three decades later Korean film took the Best Picture Oscar, Korean pop is a global industry, and Korean television is watched everywhere. Meanwhile the country now has the lowest fertility rate ever recorded anywhere - around 0.7 - which is the demographic bill for how hard the growth was driven.