We investigate the relevance of beta (β, absolute and conditional) and sigma (σ) convergence in the economies of the Common Monetary Area of Southern Africa and in the provinces of the Republic of South Africa using panel data, allowing an understanding of growth and inequality in the region....

Understanding the relationship between income inequality and economic growth is of utmost importance to economists and social scientists. In this paper we use a Bayesian structural vector autoregression approach to estimate the relationship between inequality and growth via growth and inequality...

How unequal is the world today? Is global income inequality falling, as many economists claim, or is it rising, as one often hears? This paper reviews the arguments and evidence. A number of concerns about the underlying data are identified, with biases going in both directions. Conceptual...

The canonical approach to analysing the poverty impact of growth is based on the comparison of poverty before and after growth. Measurement tools that endorse this approach fail to capture the different experiences of poverty dynamics in the population: there can be groups of the population made...

Productivity and socio-economic progress are inter-connected. Economic growth funds policies that promote socio-economic progress, while the latter serves as a growth engine. A society with high mobility is one where individual achievements are influenced less by the individual’s parents and...

Since 1994, a great deal has been accomplished. We argue that poverty reduction was temporarily sidelined in the 2000s. A series of shocks, especially the fuel and food price crisis of 2008, combined with poor productivity growth in agriculture and a weather shock, undermined progress in...

In this paper, we apply the first-order dominance (FOD) approach to assessing multidimensional welfare to analyse multidimensional poverty in Zambia in 1996, 2006, and 2010. In addition to evaluating welfare across time and space, we extend the methodology to evaluate welfare by rural...

Reducing poverty and inequality and promoting inclusive growth are fundamental to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Much has changed in the global economy in recent decades and perspectives on progress made vary widely. This is even more so in light of the ongoing...

The increasing dominance of finance starting in the late 1970s/early 1980s in the US and the UK, and somewhat later in other countries, was associated with two fundamental and structural processes generating the contradictions of this phase of development and finally the financial and economic...

This paper examines a broad range of opportunities for addressing the pressing human development needs of low-income countries by using new oil, gas, and mineral discoveries. It assesses how much of an impact can be made on the funding gaps for health and education by new oil and gas revenues,...