Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa from Pre-colonial times to the Present

Marlous van Waijenburg, Harvard Business School
Michiel De Haas, Wageningen University
Ewout Frankema, Wageningen University

The importance of studying economic inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa is hard to overstate. The incidence of poverty in Africa’s low and lower middle-income societies is not only linked to aggregate economic performance, but also to the distribution of wealth and income. While African inequality has received increasing attention of scholars and policymakers, our understanding of its deeper determinants and trajectories is limited. Leading scholars such as Thomas Piketty (2014) and Branco Milanovic (2017) have demonstrated that viewing inequality in a comparative and long-run perspective – over centuries rather than decades – yields important insights into how inequality is intimately tied up with the dynamics of capitalism and globalization. However, their grand narratives have little to say about the evolution of inequality in the ‘Global South’ and are particular silent on Sub-Saharan Africa (see also Scheidel 2018; Alfani & di Tullio 2019). Rather than being a shortcoming of these studies, this silence reflects that the state-of-the-art knowledge on African inequality in the long-run lags far behind what is known for other world regions. A perspective on African long-run inequality trajectories, therefore, is long overdue.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 183. Inequality, Wealth and Poverty