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.

The devil is in the detail: growth, inequality and poverty reduction in Africa in the last two decades

Fabio Clementi;Michele Fabiani;
2019-01-01

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.
2019
Oxford University Press
Internazionale
https://academic.oup.com/jae/article-abstract/28/4/408/5373587?redirectedFrom=fulltext
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11393/248742
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