Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/298215 
Year of Publication: 
2023
Series/Report no.: 
AGDI Working Paper No. WP/23/022
Publisher: 
African Governance and Development Institute (AGDI), Yaoundé
Abstract: 
Poverty and inequality represent major policy syndromes that are relevant in the achievement of most United Nations' sustainable development goals (SDGs) in sub-Saharan Africa, while economic growth is also essential for the achievement of attendant SDGs. The present study extends existing literature by assessing the conditional influence of poverty, income inequality and severity of poverty on economic growth. The focus is on 42 countries in sub-Saharan Africa with data from 1980 to 2019. The Gini index is used to measure income inequality. Poverty is measured in terms of the poverty headcount ratio while the severity of poverty is computed as the squared of the poverty gap index. The empirical evidence is based on quantile regressions in order to assess how income inequality and poverty dynamics affect economic growth throughout the conditional distribution of economic growth. Our main finding shows that the negative response of economic growth to poverty is a decreasing function of economic growth. In other words, the incidence of poverty in reducing economic growth decreases with increasing levels of economic growth. In two specifications, the effect of inequality is negative in bottom quantiles and positive in top quantiles of the conditional distribution of economic growth. Policy implications are discussed, especially as it pertains to: (i) the relevance of poverty in mitigating economic growth in SSA contingent on initial levels of economic growth and (ii) comparative incidences of poverty and inequality in affecting economic growth.
Subjects: 
poverty
inequality
economic growth
sub-Saharan Africa
econometrics
economics
JEL: 
D31
I10
I32
K40
O55
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.