Isis Gaddis

Poverty in a Rising Africa

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.

The Gendered Labor Market Impacts of Trade Liberalization: Evidence from Brazil

This paper investigates the impact of Brazils trade liberalization on gender differences in labor market outcomes, using difference-in-difference estimation that exploits variation in preliberalization industry composition across microregions. We find that trade liberalization reduced male and female labor force participation rates and tradable sector employment rates, particularly among the low-skilled population. As aggregate effects on men are significantly larger, liberalization reduced the percentage point gender gap in employment and participation rates. However, in proportionate terms, we find no evidence that womens employment and participation increased relative to mens, or that women benefitted from the procompetitive effects of free trade.

La pauvreté dans une Afrique en essor

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.

Prices for Poverty Analysis in Africa

Measuring poverty requires adjusting nominal consumption (or income) into a real value of consumption, across geographic areas and over time. To this end, data on consumer prices are used to construct a price index. There are a range of approaches to do this, from using the consumer price index, to survey-based unit values, which differ in the underlying sources of price data and methodologies for indexing. These different approaches can have large impacts on poverty measures and trends. Surprisingly little attention has been focused on this topic. This study reviews a range of issues and the evidence on how prices matter for measuring poverty, particularly in Africa. It draws on a wide literature, much from developed countries, and offers suggestions for future work in this area.