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 nonparametric method-the relative distribution-the pape...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Clementi, F.
Other Authors: Fabiani, M., Molini, V.
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Washington, D.C The World Bank 2018
Series:World Bank E-Library Archive
Online Access:
Collection: World Bank E-Library Archive - Collection details see MPG.ReNa
Description
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
Physical Description:25 pages