Join getAbstract to access the summary!

Africa Is on Time

Join getAbstract to access the summary!

Africa Is on Time

Federal Reserve Bank of New York,

5 min read
5 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

Poverty in Africa fell by half between 1990 and 2015, so that Millennium Development Goal is in place.

auto-generated audio
  • 0.5×
  • 0.75×
  • 1×
  • 1.25×
  • 1.5×
  • 1.75×
1×
auto-generated audio

Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Analytical
  • Eye Opening
  • Overview

Recommendation

Economists Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-i-Martin make the contrarian but compelling argument that Africa’s economies have been improving since the 1990s and that the continent’s extreme poverty is lessening. Intriguingly, they analyze African nations in terms of their European colonizers, their legacies of slavery, their natural resources and their geographic position, but they cite the standard poverty rates, too. getAbstract recommends this eye-opening report to investors and policy makers seeking insight into African economies.

Summary

Since the 1990s, inhabitants of African nations have made significant strides toward moving out of extreme poverty. The United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) call for cutting poverty in half from 1990 to 2015. Many parts of the world – notably Asia – have moved well ahead in achieving the MDGs. In Africa, the pace has been slower, but the goal is being achieved. In 1990, the poverty rate for 32 nations in sub-Saharan African was 34%; more than one-third of the region subsisted on $1 a day or less. That percentage spiked to 36.5% in 1992. Over the following two decades, however, African economies...

About the Authors

Maxim Pinkovskiy is an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Xavier Sala-i-Martin is a professor of economics at Columbia University.

Comment on this summary