The Consumption, Income, and Wealth of the Poorest : Cross-Sectional Facts of Rural and Urban Sub-Saharan Africa for Macroeconomists

De Magalhaes, Leandro ; Santaeulalia-Llopis, Raul

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: LIVING STANDARDS;    PER CAPITA CONSUMPTION;    FORECASTS;    RISKS;    HOUSEHOLD SIZE;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-7337
RP-ID  :  WPS7337

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

This paper provides new empiricalinsights on the joint distribution of consumption, income,and wealth in three of the poorest countries in the world —Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda — all located in Sub-SaharanAfrica (SSA). The first finding is that while incomeinequality is similar to that of the United States (US),wealth inequality is barely one-third that of the US.Similarly, while the top of the income distribution (1 and10 percent) earns a similar share of total income in SSA asin the US, the share of total wealth accumulated by theincome-rich in SSA is one-fifth of its US counterpart. Themain contributions of the paper are to document: (i) thisdwarfed transmission from income to wealth, which suggeststhat SSA households face a larger inability to save andaccumulate wealth compared with US households; and (ii) alower transmission from income to consumption inequality,which suggests the presence of powerful institutions thatfavor consumption insurance to the detriment of saving.These features are more relevant for rural areas, whichrepresent roughly four-fifths of the total population. Thepaper identifies the few successful pockets of the SSApopulation that are able to accumulate wealth by exploringsources of inequality such as age, education, migration,borrowing ability, and societal systems.