Looking at Pro-Poor Growth from an Agricultural Perspective

Pro-poor growth has been identified as one of the most promising pathways to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) or any subsequent set of goals aiming to reduce poverty worldwide. Related research has developed a multitude of instruments to measure pro-poor growth using absolute and relative approaches and income and non-income data. This article contributes to the literature by expanding the toolbox with several new measures based on the concept of the growth incidence curve by Ravallion and Chen (2003) and the opportunity curve by Ali and Son (2007) that take into account the extraordinary importance of agriculture for poverty reduction in developing countries. The toolbox is then applied to two comparable household surveys from Rwanda (EICV data for the years 1999-2001 and 2005-2006), a country that has experienced impressive economic growth since the genocide in the mid-1990s and that has undertaken considerable efforts to increase the population’s access to social services over the last decade. Results indicate that Rwanda achieved in this time period enormous progress in the income, but also in the education and health dimension of poverty, which was in many cases even pro-poor in the relative sense. The new tools further reveal that agricultural productivity of the labor/land productivity-poor increased relatively (but not absolutely) faster than for the labor/land productivity-rich. Lastly, we find indications that the labor productivity-poor dispose of less education than the labor productivity-rich which may imply further potential to increase the poor’s productivity levels if their education levels increased.