Poverty in a Rising Africa

By Kathleen G. Beegle, L. Christiaensen, Andrew L. Dabalen, Isis Gaddis. 2016

447 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This report is the first of a two-part volume on poverty in Africa. This study documents the data challenges and revisits the core broad facts about poverty in Africa; the second report will explore ways to accelerate its reduction. The report takes a broad, multidimensional view of poverty, assessing progress over the past two decades along both monetary and nonmonetary dimensions. The dearth of comparable, good-quality household consumption surveys makes assessing monetary poverty especially challenging. The report scrutinizes the data used to assess monetary poverty in the region and explores how adjustments for data issues affect poverty trends. At the same time, the remarkable expansion of standardized household surveys on nonmonetary dimensions of well-being, including opinions and perceptions, opens up new opportunities. The report examines progress in education and health, the extent to which people are free from violence and able to shape their lives, and the joint occurrence of various types of deprivation. It also reviews the distributional aspects of poverty,by studying various dimensions of inequality. To shed light on Africa’s diversity, the report examines differences in performance across countries, by location, and by gender. Countries are characterized along four dimensions that have been shown to affect growth and poverty: resource richness, fragility, landlockedness and income status. To conclude, a portion of inequality in Africa can be attributed to inequality of opportunity, circumstances at birth that are major determinants of one’s poverty status as an adult.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2d8195870d5d5652621a79cdab78762d70b2a9c3

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Citations in the corpus

On the Structural Transformation of Rural Africa (2017, background): “2 Careful scrutiny of the data suggests that the number may be somewhat lower, but even under the most optimistic data scenario, more than 330 million people were estimated to be extreme poor in 2012 (Beegle et al., 2016).”
Inequality, ICT and financial access in Africa (2019, background): “First, exclusive development is a policy concern in Africa because after two decades of unprecedented economic prosperity and decreasing rates of extreme poverty, the number of people living in extreme poverty is still substantially higher in 2012 than it was in 1990 (Beegle et al., 2016: xi).”
Realizing the Full Potential of Social Safety Nets in Africa (2018, background): “Multiple deprivations still characterize the lives of a sizable share of African women (data on men are not available) (Beegle et al. 2016).”
Not Your Average Job: Measuring Farm Labor in Tanzania (2016, unknown): “…methods hamper comparisons over time and space if survey methods differ, as has been shown in the context of the measurement of welfare, poverty, and hunger (Backiny-Yetna, Steele, and Djima 2014; Beegle et al. 2012, 2016; De Weerdt et al. 2016) and labor measurement (Bardasi et al. 2011).”
Education, lifelong learning, inequality and financial access: evidence from African countries (2020, background): “This is why exclusive development remains a growing concern in Africa (Beegle et al., 2015).”
Accelerating Poverty Reduction in Africa (2019, background): “He also co-led the World Bank regional study, Poverty in a Rising Africa, the precursor to this report.”