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...

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...

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...

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...

This paper examines how inequality could be tackled through structural transformation using unit record data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for Africa. Results suggest inequality between countries tends to be higher when the share of labor employed or value-added in the...

In the absence of third party and prepayment systems such as health insurance and tax-based healthcare financing, households in many low-income countries are exposed to the financial risks of paying large medical bills from out-of-pocket. In recent years, community based health insurance schemes...

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...

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...

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...