Growth and Poverty in Africa: Shifting Fortunes and New Perspectives

Abebe Abebe

No 8751, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Growth has been high and widespread in the last decade in Africa. Whether this shift in Africa's fortune has impacted poverty has been a subject of controversy. This paper brings into focus recent evidence on the pace of poverty reduction in Africa and addresses whether or not previously held belief that Africa is too poor to grow is relevant today. The findings suggest that there is credible evidence for poverty to have declined significantly since the 1990s but at a lesser speed than growth in per capita GDP. More importantly, global poverty tends to respond much more strongly to shifts in sector of employment, particularly to increase in employment in the industrial sector, than to increase in mean income. In Africa the co-existence of a large traditional and informal sector with a dynamic modern sector will continue to pose a challenge for achieving a sustained reduction in poverty. Challenges of structural transformation and its attendant benefits are discussed using emerging thinking on industrial policies to achieve inclusive growth in Africa.

Keywords: economic growth; poverty traps; multidimensional poverty; structural transformation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2014-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - part of this paper published as 'Poverty: Shifting Fortunes and New Perspectives' in: The Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 1, Oxford University Press, 2015

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp8751.pdf (application/pdf)

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:iza:izadps:dp8751

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().