Publication: The Devil Is in the Details: Growth, Polarization, and Poverty Reduction in Africa in the Past Two Decades
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2018-06
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2018-06-28
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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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“Clementi, F.; Fabiani, M.; Molini, V.. 2018. The Devil Is in the Details: Growth, Polarization, and Poverty Reduction in Africa in the Past Two Decades. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 8494. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29947 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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