Lovely, lovely sentences on African poverty


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.

And there's more, from a new NBER paper by Sala-i-Martin and Pinkovskiy entitled AFRICAN POVERTY IS FALLING...MUCH FASTER THAN YOU THINK!(I covered their previous related paper here):

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.

And there's some lovely graphs too - the style is unappealing, but the content is so sweet it's worth framing them and hanging them on every wall you can find:


And here's where I'll be going in a month's time:


Yes, there is such thing as an uplifting economic paper.

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