Growth and Poverty Reduction : Case Studies from West Africa
The objective of this volume is to assess the relationships between growth and poverty reduction on the basis of a number of case studies, all but one of which are based on recent household survey data. The first part of the volume presents data on...
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Format: | Publication |
Language: | English en_US |
Published: |
Washington, DC : World Bank
2012
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Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2007/01/9870768/growth-poverty-reduction-case-studies-west-africa http://hdl.handle.net/10986/6875 |
Summary: | The objective of this volume is to
assess the relationships between growth and poverty
reduction on the basis of a number of case studies, all but
one of which are based on recent household survey data. The
first part of the volume presents data on Ghana and Senegal,
two countries that have benefited from high levels of growth
over the last dozen years. The analysis suggests that growth
led to substantial reductions in the share of the population
in poverty. Yet growth could not be said to be
"pro-poor" because the gains in consumption for
better off households were proportionately larger than the
gains for poorer households. In the second part of the
volume, case studies for Burkina Faso and Cape Verde are
presented to solve the paradox of high growth without
poverty reduction. It was initially believed in both
countries that there had been no poverty reduction despite
high growth during the 1990s. Yet a closer examination of
the data suggests that this paradox was actually due to
measurement errors: more careful work confirmed that poverty
reduction was substantial. The third and last part of the
volume presents case studies for Guinea-Bissau and Nigeria
on the impediments to growth, with a focus on the negative
impact of conflict and macroeconomic volatility on growth,
and thereby on poverty. Overall, this volume makes a strong
case for the positive impact of growth for the reduction in
income and consumption poverty in West Africa but it also
points to the need to pay close attention to changes in
inequality as such changes have limited the gains from
growth for the poor in several of the countries considered here. |
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