All that Glitters Is Not Gold : Polarization Amid Poverty Reduction in Ghana
Ghana is an exceptional case in the Sub-Saharan Africa landscape. Together with a handful of other countries, Ghana offers the opportunity to analyze the distributional changes in the past two decades, since four comparable household surveys are av...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2016
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2016/07/26585411/all-glitters-not-gold-polarization-amid-poverty-reduction-ghana http://hdl.handle.net/10986/24839 |
| Summary: | Ghana is an exceptional case in the
Sub-Saharan Africa landscape. Together with a handful of
other countries, Ghana offers the opportunity to analyze the
distributional changes in the past two decades, since four
comparable household surveys are available. In addition,
different from many other countries in the continent,
Ghana's rapid growth translated into fast poverty
reduction. A closer look at the distributional changes that
occurred in the same period, however, suggests less
optimism. The present paper develops an innovative
methodology to analyze the distributional changes that
occurred and their drivers, with a high degree of accuracy
and granularity. Looking at the results from 1991 to 2012,
the paper documents how the distributional changes hollowed
out the middle of the Ghanaian household consumption
distribution and increased the concentration of households
around the highest and lowest deciles; there was a clear
surge in polarization indeed. When looking at the drivers of
polarization, household characteristics, educational
attainment, and access to basic infrastructure all tended to
increase over time the size of the upper and lower tails of
the consumption distribution and, as a consequence, the
degree of polarization. |
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