The Devil is in the Detail: Growth, Inequality and Poverty Reduction in Africa in the Last Two Decades

Abstract

The present paper, starting from evidence of low growth-to-poverty elasticity characterising Africa, purports to identify the distributional changes that limited the pro-poor impact of the last two decades’ growth. Distributional changes that went undetected by standard inequality measures were not showing a clear pattern of inequality on the continent. By applying a new decomposition technique based on a non-parametric method—the ‘relative distribution’—we found a clear distributional pattern affecting almost all analysed countries. Nineteen out twenty four countries experienced a significant increase in polarisation, particularly in the lower tail of the distribution, and this distributional change lowered the pro-poor impact of growth substantially. Without this unfavourable redistribution, poverty could have decreased in these countries by an additional five percentage points.

Comparative investigation of the growth-poverty-inequality trilemma in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin American and Caribbean Countries

“…Inequality manifests as income gap, gender inequality, inequality of opportunity, as well as, differences in standard of living -like health inequality and energy inequality (Brunori et al, 2019;Ramosa et al, 2020;and Gershon et al, 2019). Despite economic growth recorded in developing countries, poverty and especially inequality are observable within cities, across regions in such countries, as well as, across regions within continents and in the global south (Clementi and Molini, 2019). In this regard, the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) countries readily come to mind because they are mostly developing.…”

Polarization and its discontents: Morocco before and after the Arab Spring

“…6 The relative distribution is a well-established approach to distributional analysis. At present, it has been employed by Alderson et al (2005), Massari et al (2009a, b), Doran (2011, 2013), Borraz et al (2013), Clementi and Schettino (2015), Nissanov and Pittau (2016), Petrarca and Ricciuti (2016), Clementi et al (2017Clementi et al ( , 2018Clementi et al ( , 2019aClementi et al ( , 2019b, and Nissanov (2017). 7 Here we limit ourselves to illustrating the basic concepts behind the use of the relative distribution method.…”

Polarization and its Discontents: Morocco before and after the Arab Spring

“…6 The relative distribution is a well-established approach to distributional analysis. At present, it has been employed by Alderson et al (2005), Massari et al (2009a, b), Doran (2011, 2013), Borraz et al (2013), Clementi and Schettino (2015), Nissanov and Pittau (2016), Petrarca and Ricciuti (2016), Clementi et al (2017Clementi et al ( , 2018Clementi et al ( , 2019aClementi et al ( , 2019b, and Nissanov (2017). 7 Here we limit ourselves to illustrating the basic concepts behind the use of the relative distribution method.…”