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Strategies & Market Trends : Africa and its Issues- Why Have We Ignored Africa? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (1043)	5/6/2010 4:05:25 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1267

Good News on African Poverty David Henderson Here's what Columbia University economist Xavier Sala-i-Martin and Columbia graduate Maxim Pinkovskiy wrote: The conventional wisdom that Africa is not reducing poverty is wrong. Using the methodology of Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin (2009), we estimate income distributions, poverty rates, and inequality and welfare indices for African countries for the period 1970-2006. We show that: (1) African poverty is falling and is falling rapidly; (2) if present trends continue, the poverty Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people with incomes less than one dollar a day will be achieved on time; (3) the growth spurt that began in 1995 decreased African income inequality instead of increasing it; (4) African poverty reduction is remarkably general: it cannot be explained by a large country, or even by a single set of countries possessing some beneficial geographical or historical characteristic. All classes of countries, including those with disadvantageous geography and history, experience reductions in poverty. In particular, poverty fell for both landlocked as well as coastal countries; for mineral-rich as well as mineral-poor countries; for countries with favorable or with unfavorable agriculture; for countries regardless of colonial origin; and for countries with below- or above-median slave exports per capita during the African slave trade. econlog.econlib.org Steve Sailer writes: How much of this good news is due to cell phones? I'd bet quite a bit. Nothing makes thing more efficient than good communications. Cell phones weren't that big a benefit in America because we had a decent land line system. But large parts of the world had terrible land line systems. You need a culture conducive to effective large organizations to run a land line system well. Italy, for example, couldn't do it. But, cell phones don't need the same kind of infrastructure, technical or cultural. Cell phones did well in anarchic Somalia during the war lord era, even when 3 out of 8 employees of the cell phone companies were armed warriors. econlog.econlib.org