The present paper, starting from evidence of low growth-to-poverty elasticity characterising Africa, purports to identify the distributional changes that limited the pro-poor impact of the last two decades’ growth. Distributional changes that went undetected by standard inequality measures were not showing a clear pattern of inequality on the continent. By applying a new decomposition technique based on a non-parametric method—the ‘relative distribution’—we found a clear distributional pattern affecting almost all analysed countries. Nineteen out twenty four countries experienced a significant increase in polarisation, particularly in the lower tail of the distribution, and this distributional change lowered the pro-poor impact of growth substantially. Without this unfavourable redistribution, poverty could have decreased in these countries by an additional five percentage points.

中文翻译：

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魔鬼在细节中：过去两年非洲的增长、不平等和减贫

本论文从描述非洲特征的低增长到贫困弹性的证据开始，旨在确定限制过去 20 年增长对穷人的影响的分配变化。标准不平等措施没有发现的分配变化并未显示出非洲大陆的明显不平等模式。通过应用基于非参数方法——“相对分布”——的新分解技术，我们发现了一个清晰的分布模式，几乎影响了所有被分析的国家。24 个国家中有 19 个国家的两极分化显着增加，特别是在分布的下端，这种分布变化大大降低了增长对穷人的影响。如果没有这种不利的再分配，