Growth and poverty reduction in Africa are weakly linked. This paper argues that the reason is that Africa has failed to create enough good jobs. Structural transformation - the relative growth of employment in high productivity sectors - has not featured in Africa's post-1995 growth story. As a...

Developing countries often face two well-known structural problems: high youth unemployment and high inequality. In recent decades, policymakers have increased the share of government spending on education in developing countries to address both of these issues. The empirical literature offers...

The literature on poverty convergence is sparse and much of the empirical evidence relies on Ravallion (2012) who found a lack of poverty convergence across some ninety Less Developed Countries (LDCs) during 1977-2007. This paper revisits cross-country poverty convergence using data from the...

Empirical evidence in the sparse literature on poverty convergence currently relies on cross-sectional analysis, where Less Developed Countries (LDCs) starting out poorer are found to have enjoyed no faster subsequent poverty reduction during the past three decades than those starting out...

In the absence of third party and prepayment systems such as health insurance and tax-based healthcare financing, households in many low-income countries are exposed to the financial risks of paying large medical bills from out-of-pocket. In recent years, community based health insurance schemes...

This paper examines how inequality could be tackled through structural transformation using unit record data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for Africa. Results suggest inequality between countries tends to be higher when the share of labor employed or value-added in the...