kozah04/ng-growth-poverty

Does economic growth reduce poverty in Africa? Panel econometrics on 34 years of World Bank data across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Ethiopia. # ng-growth-poverty An analysis of whether economic growth actually reduces poverty and whether it does so equally across different African countries. The short answer is: growth helps, but not equally and Nigeria gets less poverty reduction per unit of growth than its peers. --- ## What This Project Does This project looks at five African countries - Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and Ethiopia and asks a simple but important question: **When a country's economy grows, do the people at the bottom actually benefit?** To answer this, we use 34 years of World Bank data (1990-2023) and three layers of analysis: 1. **Nigeria in depth** - Is the relationship between GDP and poverty real and stable or does it break down during shocks like the 2016 oil crash or COVID? 2. **Across all five countries** - Does a unit of economic growth buy the same amount of poverty reduction in Nigeria as it does in Ghana or Ethiopia? 3. **What else matters** - Beyond GDP, do inequality, inflation or foreign aid independently affect poverty? --- ## What We Found | Question | Answer | |---|---| | Does growth reduce poverty in Nigeria? | Yes. A sustained increase in GDP per capita is reliably associated with falling poverty and this held even through major economic shocks. | | Did the 2016 recession or COVID break the relationship? | No. The underlying connection between growth and poverty stayed intact. The shocks caused temporary setbacks not a permanent change in how growth transmits to welfare. | | Does growth reduce poverty equally across countries? | No. Ghana and South Africa get significantly more poverty reduction per unit of growth than Nigeria. Kenya is the only country where poverty actually rose as GDP grew - still unexplained. | | What drives poverty beyond GDP? | Nothing significant. Once we account for each country's fixed characteristics, only GDP matters. Inequality, inflation, and foreign aid do not independently predict poverty changes within countries. | **T …