African Poverty is Falling…Much Faster than You Think?
This is most encouraging news but it would have been helpful to identify those countries where the overall standard of living for ordinary inhabitants has improved despite population increases, civil strife, refugee and IDP camps, droughts, floods, heavy dependence upon extractive industries (well integrated with the world economy but not necessarily to the local one) and corruption. I can think of some countries that have made net progress but am skeptical about many, so some supporting detail about the overall economically improving countries would have been welcome.
A Reuters item:
Africa News blog
The old image of an Africa doomed to get ever poorer has certainly lost credence over the past decade even if it is a view still held by some.
Well, according to a new study, Africans are getting wealthier more quickly than previously believed and the poorest continent’s riches are also spreading beyond the narrow confines of its elite.
“Africa is reducing poverty, and doing it much faster than we thought,” the study by U.S.-based economists Xavier Sala-i-Martin and Maxim Pinkovskiy said.
“The growth from the period 1995-2006, far from benefiting only the elites, has been sufficiently widely spread that both total African inequality and African within-country inequality actually declined over this period.”
Get the Study here
How realistic a picture do you think the new research paints?
