This paper conceptualizes intergenerational occupational mobility between the farm and non-farm sectors in five African countries, measures it using nationally representative household survey data, and analyzes its determinants through a comparative method based on pooled logit regressions. We...

A new analysis of large-sample surveys in five comparable Sub-Saharan African countries allows measuring for the first time inequality of opportunity in Africa, aside inequality of resources and of living standards. We confirm the prevalence of high levels of inequality among the region’s...

How fluid are African societies? This paper uses wide-sample nationally representative surveys to set down the first comparative measurement of the extent and features of the social mobility of men in five countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. Intergenerational as well as intra-generational mobility...

Commentaire du "Rapport sur le développement dans le monde 2006: Equité et développement".

By applying regression discontinuity designs to a set of household surveys from the 1980–90s, we examine whether Côte d’Ivoire’s aggregate wealth was translated at the borders of neighboring countries. At the border of Ghana and at the end of the 1980s, large discontinuities are detected...

The purpose of our paper is to derive instructive analytics on how to account for differentials in demographic variables, and in particular mortality, when performing welfare comparisons over time. The idea is to “correct” in various ways estimated income distribution measures for “sample...

Survey data reveals that the pace of increase in height stature experienced by successive cohorts born in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana during the late colonial period (1925–1960) is almost as high as the pace observed in France and Great Britain during the period 1875 to 1975, even when correcting...

Macroeconomic data on 45 countries are combined with microeconomic data on 4 case-study countries to reveal signifi cant differences in the levels of education attained under the different colonial powers in Africa during the colonial period. In 1960, former British colonies exhibited higher...