Since 1991 the national poverty rate ofGhana has more than halved. The estimated national headcountpoverty ratio fell by 31.2 percentage points from 52.6percent in 1991 to 21.41 percent in 2012. Heterogeneity ofpoverty outcomes is, however, high both across urban andrural areas and across regions. The robustness of thesepoverty trends is checked with trends of five correlates:urbanization and rural-urban migration, remittances, assetgrowth, labor market transformations, and agriculturalproductivity growth. Urbanization turns out to be highlycorrelated with poverty reduction. Poverty trends and assetindex trends turn out to follow a similar pattern in bothurban and rural areas and by regions: asset index increasewhere poverty decreases. In the report the authors try tounderstand the drivers of recent decrease in poverty innorthern regions. The attention is focused on two differentaspects, the agricultural productivity growth and theinflation patterns. In northern regions, there is ageneralized increase in production of main food crops and anincrease in productivity. To test the contribution of mostof these drivers to poverty reduction, the authors estimatedunconditional quintile regressions over the 20th, 40th, and60th percentiles and decomposed the results using the OaxacaBlinder method. To further strengthen the spatial analysisof poverty the authors constructed a new poverty map basedon sixth Ghana living standard survey (GLSS 6) (conducted in2012-13) in combination with the 2010 census, which was thencompared with the 2000 map. This profile focuses oninequalities seen from three different perspectives:consumption inequality, inequalities of opportunities, and polarization.
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