Growth and Poverty Reduction in Africa in the Last Two Decades: Evidence from an AERC Growth-Poverty Project and Beyond

Sub-Saharan Africa has seen a return to good economic growth performance in the last 15 years, and especially in the last 5–10 years; while this partly reflects the good performance of commodities, several other factors are also important. Focusing on 25 of the largest 26 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, this paper asks the question of how this growth has translated into poverty reduction, drawing on household survey evidence from countries that have comparable surveys at more than one point in time, and looking at non-monetary poverty as well as monetary measures of poverty. A significant part of the analysis draws on country studies from a recent AERC collaborative project looking at the growth–poverty nexus in Sub-Saharan Africa, but it also draws on a wider evidence base. Poverty has fallen significantly over this period in most countries, though to a somewhat lesser extent than has been asserted in a recent NBER working paper drawing on national accounts data; the evidence presented in this paper is more robust. Non-monetary poverty does not necessarily change in parallel with monetary poverty