As a percentage of population, Africa’s poverty rate has dropped; however, this tells a sunnier story than the reality that nearly twice as many Africans cannot afford their most basic needs today as 30 years ago (appox. 432M vs. 280M).
Firstly and most obviously, 432/280-1 = a 54% increase, which is quite far from ‘nearly twice as many’.
Secondly, this relies on comparing 1990 to 2023, even though these years are actually more than 30 years apart. If we instead use 1993, OWID suggests a denominator of 321m, and hence an increase of only 35%, which does not seem like ‘nearly twice’. It is literally closer to ‘no change’ than ‘twice’.
Thirdly, I am curious as to the source for this 2023 figure. Traditionally macroeconomic data is only published with a lag; the BEA doesn’t produce even its initial estimate of GDP for almost a month after the quarter, and the final version is months later. Similarly US corporations with sophisticated accounting software and complete control of their activities won’t release their figures for over a month after the quarter closes. Given the difficulties collecting data in Sub-Saharan Africa, it is very surprising to me that the 2023 figure is already available. Your source in turn lists two sources.
One of these sources is this 2022 paper about the covid impact, which does not contain 2023 data. It uses surveys done in 2020, though for Sub-Saharan Africa these phone surveys do not even directly ask about income or consumption, which had to be imputed:
While the phone surveys provide information on whether households gained or lost income or consumption since the beginning of the pandemic, they do not contain information on households’ level of income or consumption, nor do they report the size of the change in income or consumption. [emphasis added]
The second source is to the World Bank Poverty and Inequality platform. There are a lot of datasets here, and I admit I haven’t looked through them all. But the most prominently displayed chart is one showing the number of people living on under $2.15/day PPP, and it only goes up to 2019.
I think what the chart you are using is doing is relying on the approach described in this paper, which uses GDP growth to impute the numbers needed to apply the methodology described in the 2022 paper. Even though GDP/Capita has been growing for Sub-Saharan Africa, this still produces suggests a growing number of people in poverty, presumably because their population growth is so high.
But this approach seems… quite dubious to me. They are using 2023 (a year that is not yet over) GDP (a statistic which takes months to compile) figures for Sub-Saharan Africa (a region notorious for poor data quality) to extrapolate the values from an earlier paper (which was itself based on imputing the figures using phone surveys that did not ask the question directly).
In general I have a lot of faith in OWID. If they only report the data up to 2019, I strongly suspect this is for a good reason, and trying to work out how the 2023 sausage was made does not shift me from this prior.
Fair point re: “nearly twice” vs. “over 50%.” Edited original point to reflect this update.
To the second point, the differences in data sources seem moot to the overall argument. If we stick just to OWID’s visual from 1990 to 2019 (pre-COVID), this is is still a 117 million person (43%) increase of the number people living in extreme poverty since 1990, which is certainly an undercount given the well-documented setbacks post 2019.
I am very skeptical of this calculation:
Firstly and most obviously, 432/280-1 = a 54% increase, which is quite far from ‘nearly twice as many’.
Secondly, this relies on comparing 1990 to 2023, even though these years are actually more than 30 years apart. If we instead use 1993, OWID suggests a denominator of 321m, and hence an increase of only 35%, which does not seem like ‘nearly twice’. It is literally closer to ‘no change’ than ‘twice’.
Thirdly, I am curious as to the source for this 2023 figure. Traditionally macroeconomic data is only published with a lag; the BEA doesn’t produce even its initial estimate of GDP for almost a month after the quarter, and the final version is months later. Similarly US corporations with sophisticated accounting software and complete control of their activities won’t release their figures for over a month after the quarter closes. Given the difficulties collecting data in Sub-Saharan Africa, it is very surprising to me that the 2023 figure is already available. Your source in turn lists two sources.
One of these sources is this 2022 paper about the covid impact, which does not contain 2023 data. It uses surveys done in 2020, though for Sub-Saharan Africa these phone surveys do not even directly ask about income or consumption, which had to be imputed:
The second source is to the World Bank Poverty and Inequality platform. There are a lot of datasets here, and I admit I haven’t looked through them all. But the most prominently displayed chart is one showing the number of people living on under $2.15/day PPP, and it only goes up to 2019.
I think what the chart you are using is doing is relying on the approach described in this paper, which uses GDP growth to impute the numbers needed to apply the methodology described in the 2022 paper. Even though GDP/Capita has been growing for Sub-Saharan Africa, this still produces suggests a growing number of people in poverty, presumably because their population growth is so high.
But this approach seems… quite dubious to me. They are using 2023 (a year that is not yet over) GDP (a statistic which takes months to compile) figures for Sub-Saharan Africa (a region notorious for poor data quality) to extrapolate the values from an earlier paper (which was itself based on imputing the figures using phone surveys that did not ask the question directly).
In general I have a lot of faith in OWID. If they only report the data up to 2019, I strongly suspect this is for a good reason, and trying to work out how the 2023 sausage was made does not shift me from this prior.
Fair point re: “nearly twice” vs. “over 50%.” Edited original point to reflect this update.
To the second point, the differences in data sources seem moot to the overall argument. If we stick just to OWID’s visual from 1990 to 2019 (pre-COVID), this is is still a 117 million person (43%) increase of the number people living in extreme poverty since 1990, which is certainly an undercount given the well-documented setbacks post 2019.