Inequality and the Impact of Growth on Poverty: Comparative Evidence for Sub-Saharan Africa

Augustin Fosu ()

Global Development Institute Working Paper Series from GDI, The University of Manchester

Abstract: This study explores the extent to which inequality affects the impact of income growth on the rates of poverty changes in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) compared to non-SSA, based on a global sample of 1977-2004 unbalanced panel data. For both regions and all three measures of poverty – headcount, gap and squared gap – the paper finds the impact of GDP growth on poverty reduction to be a decreasing function of initial inequality. The impacts are similar in direction for SSA and non-SSA, so that within both regions there are considerable disparities in the responsiveness of poverty to income growth, depending on inequality. Nevertheless, income-growth elasticity is substantially less for SSA, implying relatively low poverty-reduction sensitivity to growth compared with the rest of the developing world. Furthermore, the paper uncovers a considerable variation in the predicted values of income-growth elasticity across a large number of SSA countries. This implies there is a need to understand country-specific inequality attributes for poverty-reduction strategies to be effective.

Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dev and nep-fdg
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (208)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hummedia.manchester.ac.uk/institutes/gdi/pu ... wpi/bwpi-wp-9809.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Inequality and the Impact of Growth on Poverty: Comparative Evidence for Sub-Saharan Africa (2009)
Working Paper: Inequality and the Impact of Growth on Poverty: Comparative Evidence for Sub-Saharan Africa (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bwp:bwppap:9809

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Global Development Institute Working Paper Series from GDI, The University of Manchester Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Rowena Harding ().