The Devil Is in the Details : Growth, Polarization, and Poverty Reduction in Africa in the Past Two Decades
This paper investigates the distributional changes that limited pro-poor growth in the past two decades in Sub-Saharan Africa; these changes went undetected by standard inequality measures. By developing a new decomposition technique based on a non...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/604321529955228067/The-devil-is-in-the-details-growth-polarization-and-poverty-reduction-in-Africa-in-the-past-two-decades http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29947 |
| Summary: | This paper investigates the
distributional changes that limited pro-poor growth in the
past two decades in Sub-Saharan Africa; these changes went
undetected by standard inequality measures. By developing a
new decomposition technique based on a nonparametric method
-- the relative distribution -- the paper finds a clear
distributional pattern affecting almost all the analyzed
countries. Nineteen of 24 countries experienced a
significant increase in polarization, particularly in the
lower tail of the distribution, and this distributional
change lowered the pro-poor impact of growth substantially.
Without this change, poverty could have decreased an
additional 5-6 percentage points during the past decade. |
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