Unfulfilled promises: reconsidering World Bank assistance projects as drivers of inclusive development in sub-Saharan Africa

Yuhang Zhuang, Liyunpeng Zhang, Michael Darko and Tianyang Liu

Applied Economics Letters, 2025, vol. 32, issue 12, 1721-1725

Abstract: ‘Urban bias’ has been a common criticism of World Bank (WB) assistance, but to what extent this will lead to non-inclusive development remains unclear. Measuring the multidimensional poverty gap of rural individuals in 31 sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries compared to the average level of urban areas in their respective first-order administrative divisions, we introduce a spatial-temporal estimation strategy and explore whether and how the WB assistance projects from 2000 to 2014 can impact SSA’s inclusive growth. Our findings suggest that while WB assistance promotes local economic growth and reduces poverty, it widens the poverty gaps between urban and rural, and even among different income groups within urban areas. Furthermore, our mechanism analysis reveals that the expanding opportunity gap between rural and urban residents is a critical channel for the non-inclusiveness of WB assistance.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13504851.2024.2314184 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:taf:apeclt:v:32:y:2025:i:12:p:1721-1725

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEL20

DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2024.2314184

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics Letters is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics Letters from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().