Assessing Absolute and Relative Pro-Poor Growth, with an Application to Selected African Countries
45 Pages Posted: 9 Apr 2012
There are 2 versions of this paper
Assessing Absolute and Relative Pro-Poor Growth, with an Application to Selected African Countries
Assessing Absolute and Relative Pro-Poor Growth, with an Application to Selected African Countries
Date Written: 2012
Abstract
This paper proposes a multidimensional procedure for jointly assessing the absolute and relative pro-poorness of growth. It is also a procedure for testing whether poverty comparisons can be made over classes of indices that incorporate both absolute and relative views of poverty. Besides being robust to whether pro-poor judgements should be absolute or relative, the procedure is also robust to choosing over a class of weights to aggregate the impact of growth on the poor as well as over ranges of absolute and relative poverty lines. The test is applied to distributional changes in five middle- and four lower-income African countries, countries that have witnessed different impacts of growth in the last two decades.
Keywords: pro-poor growth, absolute poverty, relative poverty, stochastic dominance
JEL Classification: D63, I32
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation