I recently mentioned a new paper by Sala-i-Martin and Pinkovskiy about poverty in Africa, and how the situation is much better than we tend to believe. Martin Ravallion – probably the world’s most prominent poverty expert – has now reacted. He agrees that African poverty has been decreasing over the last 15 years, but he is cautious:
We must first be clear about what we mean when we say “poverty is falling”. What many people mean is falling numbers of poor. However, Sala-i-Martin and Pinkovskiy refer solely to the poverty rate—the percentage of people who are poor. (There is no mention of this important distinction in their paper.)… Here we agree: aggregate poverty rates have fallen in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) since the mid-1990s. Shahoua Chen and I came to exactly the same conclusion in our research, for the World Bank’s global poverty monitoring effort, although our methods differ considerably and (no surprise) I prefer our methods. However, Chen and I also point out that the decline in the aggregate poverty rate has not been sufficient to reduce the number of poor, given population growth…
As we warn explicitly in our paper, this is not yet sufficient survey data to be confident about the (promising) downward trend for Africa’s aggregate poverty rate that Sala-i-Martin and Pinkovskiy have announced with such confidence.
Hopefully we will see a confirmation of the emerging downward trend for Africa in the years ahead, as more (genuine) data emerge. (source, source, source)
Again proof that poverty statistics may be tasty sausages but you wouldn’t want to see them made. And that’s not just the case for third world statistics. Even U.S. poverty statistics are a mess.
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