Growth, polarization and poverty reduction in Africa in the past two decades

La presente tesi osserva la situazione della crescita, della disuguaglianza, dal punto di vista della polarizzazione, e della povert\ue0 nel continente africano negli ultimi due decenni. La prima parte, partendo dall'evidenza di una bassa elasticit\ue0 del rapporto crescita-povert\ue0 che caratterizza l'Africa, intende identificare i cambiamenti distributivi che hanno limitato l'impatto a favore dei poveri della crescita degli ultimi due decenni. I cambiamenti distributivi che non sono stati rilevati da misure standard di disuguaglianza non hanno mostrato un chiaro schema di disuguaglianza nel continente. Viene applicata una nuova tecnica di decomposizione basata su un metodo non parametrico - la "distribuzione relativa" - e si trova un chiaro schema distributivo che interessa quasi tutti i paesi analizzati. Diciannove su 24 paesi hanno registrato un significativo aumento della polarizzazione, in particolare nella parte inferiore della distribuzione, e questo cambiamento distributivo ha ridotto sostanzialmente l'impatto pro-poveri della crescita. Senza questa ridistribuzione sfavorevole, la povert\ue0 potrebbe essere diminuita in questi paesi di altri cinque punti percentuali. La seconda parte utilizza una serie di indagini nazionali sulle famiglie per fornire le prime stime del livello di polarizzazione e disuguaglianza per l'Africa subsahariana nel suo insieme nel periodo dal 1997 al 2012. Salva per un leggero calo tra il 1997 e il 2002, polarizzazione regionale costantemente aumentato negli anni 2000 con una maggiore polarizzazione nella coda inferiore della distribuzione rispetto alla coda superiore. Questo aumento della polarizzazione regionale \ue8 stato principalmente determinato dall'aumento della polarizzazione tra i paesi, il che significa che l'Africa subsahariana tende a polarizzarsi spazialmente con i paesi cono meridionali che si collocano al di sopra della media e i paesi dell'Africa centrale sono in ritardo. L'ultima parte osserva la situazione della polarizzazione in tre paesi del Nord Africa, Tunisia, Marocco ed Egitto, nel periodo tra ci\uf2 che viene definito come la \u201cPrimavera Araba\u201d usando le metodologie viste sopra. I tre paesi hanno registrato un significativo aumento della polarizzazione, in particolare nella parte inferiore della distribuzione

Is inequality systematically underestimated in sub-Saharan Africa ? A proposal to overcome the problem

In Africa, evidence on the interactions among poverty, growth, and income distribution presents a puzzle: While growth has been robust in recent decades, the growth elasticity of poverty has remained low. This suggests that inequality has dampened the pro-poor effects of growth. However, when using standard inequality measures, there is only scattered evidence of high and growing inequality in Africa outside the extremely unequal southern cone. This paper argues that inequality mismeasurement could be the main culprit responsible for this paradox: consumption-based measures miss important information at the top end of the consumption distribution, leading to underestimation of inequality. This paper proposes distinct solutions, arguing that by reevaluating the importance of distributional issues in Africa, the need becomes apparent for refreshing the research agenda on African development in such a way that the interaction between poverty and inequality becomes a core concern

Does gender equality in labor participation bring real equality? Evidence from developed and developing countries

Drawing on various macro- and micro-data sources, the authors present robust evidence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between female labor force participation and inequality. Overall, female labor force participation is found to have a strong and significant dis-equalizing impact in at least three groups of developing countries with relatively low initial levels of participation. A decile-level analysis shows that female labor force participation has higher levels of returns among top deciles compared with the lower deciles in the developing countries analyzed. This evidence focuses attention on the importance of developing policies specifically targeting women in lower deciles of the income distribution

What explains youth unemployment in Morocco? A look at Moroccans not in education, employment, or training

In many regions of the world, the persistent, and growing, proportion of young people who are currently Not in Employment, Education or Training - a group increasingly referred to as NEET - is of global concern. This is no less true of Morocco: about 30 percent of the Moroccan population between age 15 to 24 are currently NEET. Drawing from various rounds of Moroccan labor force surveys, this chapter contributes to understanding the complex dynamics of labor markets in developing countries. First, it identifies the socioeconomic determinants of Morocco's NEETs. Second, employing a Markov's chain in the context of labor market analysis, the chapter describes how the condition of NEETs changes over time. One striking, and worrisome, pattern that emerges from this analysis is that a majority of the NEETs remain outside either the labor market or education, with very little chance of moving out of their situation. Their chronic stagnancy confirms the powerful effect that initial conditions have on determining young people's future outcomes

Once NEET, always NEET? A synthetic panel approach to analyze the Moroccan labor market

In many regions of the world, the persistent, and growing, proportion of young people who are currently not in employment, education, or training is of global concern. This is no less true of Morocco: about 30 percent of the Moroccan population between ages 15 and 24 are currently not in employment, education, or training. Drawing from various rounds of Moroccan labor force surveys, this paper contributes to understanding the complex dynamics of labor markets in developing countries. First, it identifies the socioeconomic determinants of Morocco's young population not in employment, education, or training. Second, employing a synthetic panel methodology in the context of labor market analysis, the paper describes how the conditions of individuals in this group has changed over time. One striking, and worrisome, pattern that emerges from the 2010 synthetic panel data is that, even after 10 years, a majority of the young population not in employment, education, or training remained outside the labor marketor education, with very little chance of moving out of their situation. Their chronic stagnancy confirms the powerful effect that initial conditions have on determining young people's future outcomes

The devil is in the details: growth, polarization, and poverty reduction in Africa in the past two decades

This paper investigates the distributional changes that limited pro-poor growth in the past two decades in Sub-Saharan Africa; these changes went undetected by standard inequality measures. By developing a new decomposition technique based on a nonparametric method - the relative distribution - the paper finds a clear distributional pattern affecting almost all the analyzed countries. Nineteen of 24 countries experienced a significant increase in polarization, particularly in the lower tail of the distribution, and this distributional change lowered the pro-poor impact of growth substantially. Without this change, poverty could have decreased an additional 5-6 percentage points during the past decade

Strategies for joining to the treatment for seropositive pregnant women to human immunodeficiency virus

Objective: To identify the strategies that the professionals use to assist in adherence to treatment of HIV positive pregnant women with Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Method: This was an exploratory, descriptive qualitative research study developed with ten professionals working in a Center and Counseling Center in southern Brazil. Data were collected from May 2010 through semi-structured interviews were subjected to thematic analysis. Results: The results showed as strategies welcoming actions, to include these pregnant women in the service and rapprochement with the team; conducting group activities and active pursuit of defaulting, respecting their autonomy and preserve their secrecy. Conclusion: that adherence to treatment is necessary for the staff involved in the care of interdisciplinary, humanized and qualified manner; the nurse may be the organizer of the shares was concluded

Worlds apart: what polarization measures reveal about Sub-Saharan Africa's growth and welfare distribution in the last two decades

Sub-Saharan Africa's development path over the past two decades has been characterized by sluggish poverty reduction occurring alongside robust economic growth. While in this context we would expect inequality to increase, standard synthetic measures provide little evidence of a generalizable uptick in inequality over this period. We argue that the standard empirical toolkit available to development economists working on SSA has limited our ability to understand the role that distributional change plays in the persistence and reproduction of poverty on the continent. For this reason, we propose that supplementing inequality measures with the analysis of polarization provides a cleaner distributional lens through which to make sense of SSA's poverty performance during this period of growth. Applying polarization measures to comparable survey data from 24 Sub-Saharan African countries, we find that there has been a generalizable increase in polarization over the past two decades - and in particular, an increased concentration of households in the lower tail of the relative distribution. That this inegalitarian trend is overlooked when using standard synthetic inequality measures confirms our hypothesis that our current toolkit represents a technical bottleneck to understanding the effects of distributional trends on poverty reduction in Sub Saharan Africa - and that polarization analysis may help overcome this

Use of new and emerging cancer drugs: what the cardiologist needs to know

: The last decade has witnessed a paradigm shift in cancer therapy, from non-specific cytotoxic chemotherapies to agents targeting specific molecular mechanisms. Nonetheless, cardiovascular toxicity of cancer therapies remains an important concern. This is particularly relevant given the significant improvement in survival of solid and haematological cancers achieved in the last decades. Cardio-oncology is a subspecialty of medicine focusing on the identification and prevention of cancer therapy-related cardiovascular toxicity (CTR-CVT). This review will examine the new definition of CTR-CVT and guiding principles for baseline cardiovascular assessment and risk stratification before cancer therapy, providing take-home messages for non-specialized cardiologists

Disease features and management of cardiomyopathies in women

: Over the last years, there has been a growing interest in the clinical manifestations and outcomes of cardiomyopathies in women. Peripartum cardiomyopathy is the only women-specific cardiomyopathy. In cardiomyopathies with X-linked transmission, women are not simply healthy carriers of the disorder, but can show a wide spectrum of clinical manifestations ranging from mild to severe manifestations because of heterogeneous patterns of X-chromosome inactivation. In mitochondrial disorders with a matrilinear transmission, cardiomyopathy is part of a systemic disorder affecting both men and women. Even some inherited cardiomyopathies with autosomal transmission display phenotypic and prognostic differences between men and women. Notably, female hormones seem to exert a protective role in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) and variant transthyretin amyloidosis until the menopausal period. Women with cardiomyopathies holding high-risk features should be referred to a third-level center and evaluated on an individual basis. Cardiomyopathies can have a detrimental impact on pregnancy and childbirth because of the associated hemodynamic derangements. Genetic counselling and a tailored cardiological evaluation are essential to evaluate the likelihood of transmitting the disease to the children and the possibility of a prenatal or early post-natal diagnosis, as well as to estimate the risk associated with pregnancy and delivery, and the optimal management strategies