Between 1993 and 2008, interpersonal inequality for Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole increased. For example, the Africa-wide Gini increased from 52% in 1993 to 56% in 2008. By contrast, Beegle et al. (2016) find no systematic increase of _within_ -country inequality in the region. Taken together, the country-decomposition of regional inequality shows that the rise in regional inequality was driven by increasing inequality between countries, i.e. an increasing dispersion in average consumption across countries. However, within-country differences continue to dominate the level of African inequality. The African growth incidence curve is upward-sloping, consistent with the increasing inequality. While mean African consumption grew at around 1% per year, living standards for the bottom third of the distribution stagnated, while the top 5% received some 40% of the total gains between 1993 and 2008 (with a growth rate of around 2% per year).

The paper is structured as follows. First, we explain the construction of our database, and then show summary statistics. Section IV presents results for the cross-sectional distribution and its inequality. Overall African inequality is decomposed into between- and within-country components in Section V. In Section VI, we study growth incidence curves, looking at both relative and absolute gains along the distribution. Section VII compares these results with what can be learnt from GDP per capita alone. We analyze relative movements over time of specific country groups in the regional distribution in Section VIII, and the final section concludes. The Appendix presents a number of robustness checks, especially the results with the 2005 PPPs. Throughout, we draw comparisons with regional results for East Asia and Pacific from a companion paper (Jirasavetakul and Lakner, forthcoming). In the early 1990s, average consumption per capita was comparable in the two regions or even slightly lower in East Asia. However, since then growth in East Asia has been much faster and, while regional inequality also increased, its growth appears less concentrated than in Africa.

# **II. Data Construction and Methodology**

The regional distribution analyzed in this paper is built from nationally representative household surveys from as many countries as possible. PovcalNet is the starting point of this data set. PovcalNet is the global database of national household surveys compiled by the research department of the World Bank, and it is the source of the World Bank’s global poverty estimates.<sup>5</sup> Where possible we supplement PovcalNet with additional data directly from household surveys. In total, we use 106 surveys, with three surveys directly from household survey data and the remainder from PovcalNet.<sup>6</sup> Because most countries do not conduct annual surveys, we have defined a number of benchmark years – 1993, 1998, 2003 and 2008 – to which we match household surveys. We begin our analysis

> 5 <u>http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/. Data downloaded 07 January 2015, which refers to data last updated on</u> 08 October 2014. While PovcalNet attempts to make the consumption measures as comparable as possible, it is important to recognize that changes in the survey methodology can have important effects (Beegle et al., 2012). However, the coverage of regional GDP and population is too low when using the set of surveys that satisfy a higher standard of comparability. For example, these surveys cover less than half of regional GDP in 2008.

> 6 We excluded one income survey from Namibia to ensure that welfare is measured as consumption expenditure throughout.

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