This paper examines the impact of democracy and trade openness on poverty. To this end, we estimate a poverty model using the generalized method of moments (system-GMM) on a sample of 24 sub-Saharan African countries during the period 2005–2016. The econometric estimates provide two main sets of results. On the linear effects side, we find that democracy increases income poverty in non-oil producing countries and has no effect in oil producing countries, while trade openness has no impact on poverty. On the non-linear side, we find that imports improve household living conditions in democratic oil-producing countries on the one hand, and contribute to reducing monetary poverty in democratic non-oil-producing countries on the other. Our results are robust to estimates by different democracy indicators. Democracy and trade openness should therefore not be considered in isolation, and simultaneous policies are needed to enhance their impact on poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.

本文考察了民主和贸易开放对贫困的影响。为此，我们在 2005-2016 年期间对 24 个撒哈拉以南非洲国家的样本使用广义矩法（system-GMM）估计了贫困模型。计量经济学估计提供了两组主要结果。在线性效应方面，我们发现民主增加了非石油生产国的收入贫困，而对石油生产国没有影响，而贸易开放对贫困没有影响。在非线性方面，我们发现进口一方面改善了民主产油国的家庭生活条件，另一方面有助于减少民主非产油国的货币贫困。我们的结果对不同民主指标的估计是稳健的。