This is potentially exciting stuff which could do a lot to defeat the notion that African nations are permanently trapped in poverty, as well as underscore the importance of economic growth as a necessary (but perhaps not sufficient) mechanism for improving the lives of the poor.
I haven’t read the paper in detail yet, so I can’t make specific comments about it’s assumptions, but there are general reasons we should be wary about getting too excited. Some of the data use the infamous Penn World Tables, a series of GDP and purchasing power parity (PPP) estimates, which are constantly being revised and are often accused of being unreliable.
The accepted facts about poverty and income distribution around the world can change quite quickly when the basic assumptions behind the data and the functional forms evolve. It was only a few years ago when World Bank revisions dropped several million people back into poverty.
See full Article.
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