Regional and Geographic Features of pro-poor growth in Africa

Abstract

The paper focuses on regional and geographic features of pro-poor growth in African countries. The concept of pro-poor growth interconnects and examines mutual relationships between income growth, income poverty and income inequality. Using the World Bank’s income data, we calculate and interpret indicators of pro-poor growth for individual African countries. Then we analyze the results in terms of African regionalization and we investigate possible associations between pro-poor growth categories and selected geographic factors such as location, population size or population density. We show that higher pro-poorness of growth is typical for countries of Northern and Western Africa. The results also indicate that some of the geographic factors are significantly associated with pro-poor growth across African countries.