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...

From 2000 to 2014, per capita gross domestic product in Sub-Saharan Africa increased by almost 35 percent in real terms, doubling in some countries. Such progress happened while agricultural productivity growth remained low in the aggregate, despite some bright spots, and poverty reduction was...

Achieving universal health coverage, including financial risk protection and access to quality essential health-care services, is one of the main Sustainable Development Goals. In low-income countries, innovative and affordable health financing systems are key to realize these goals. This paper...

This paper presents evidence on the making of the middle class in Africa by exploiting a comparable micro data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for thirty-seven countries over two decades consisting of over seven hundred thousand household histories. We constructed a pseudo-panel to...

Empirical evidence in the sparse literature on poverty convergence currently relies on cross-sectional analysis, where Less Developed Countries (LDCs) starting out poorer are found to have enjoyed no faster subsequent poverty reduction during the past three decades than those starting out...

The literature on poverty convergence is sparse and much of the empirical evidence relies on Ravallion (2012) who found a lack of poverty convergence across some ninety Less Developed Countries (LDCs) during 1977-2007. This paper revisits cross-country poverty convergence using data from the...

Growth and poverty reduction in Africa are weakly linked. This paper argues that the reason is that Africa has failed to create enough good jobs. Structural transformation - the relative growth of employment in high productivity sectors - has not featured in Africa's post-1995 growth story. As a...

We examine the fertilizer retail-import price gap in 14 African countries between 2002 and 2013. This price differential is large and remains persistent even after accounting for changes in the cost of domestic transportation. We hypothesize that these persistent deviations may be indicative of...

This paper presents evidence on the making of the middle class in Africa by exploiting a comparable micro data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for thirty-seven countries over two decades consisting of over seven hundred thousand household histories. We constructed a pseudo-panel to...