 Good morning. My name is Finn Taub. I'm a professor at the University of Copenhagen. I was so happy to be director of UNIWIDER for about 10 years before that, but this presentation that I'm now going to, this introduction that I'm now going to give, I'm giving on behalf of Eniguna Endungu, who is the Executive Director of the ARC, but who was last week made Minister of Finance in Kenya, so he presents his apologies. His Director of Research passport, he made this passport, is stuck in the UK, so that's why they had to call in some emergency collaboration from myself. I am associated with the ARC as Chair of what is called Group A, so that's the link. This session will consist of this brief introduction, which will be elaborating a little bit on the project called Growth, Poverty and Inequality, GPIR, which is a collaborative to ARC project, and then after that, there will be one presentation by Yuxi Wang, who is a professor at the University of Tulsa, and after that, there will be a presentation by Professor Jaman Omwabu, who is a professor at the University of Nairobi. And then at the end is the third presentation. I will give a presentation on a paper that's not strictly under the GPIR program, but which is work that has been happening under the so-called Equal Program, but it was put in this session because actually no less than three percenters had to present their apologies, so I was put in as a default, and I hope I can do something that will be interesting. So the GPIR project is a project funded by NORAD, it's been executed by ARC, and it has roots back to some very successful work that the ARC did in the late 90s and early 2000s on poverty income distribution and labor market issues in Africa. Among those who work on these issues in Africa, that in many ways was a cornerstone of this work, and it included a lot of capacity-building, it included a lot of country-level work. I myself actually was responsible for interacting with a Mozambican team on these issues. It was a very influential project, it influenced the poverty reduction strategy papers, and as always in research many issues remained unresolved. And over the last two decades, while poverty has declined in Africa, it hasn't really left to so big, deep impacts as we would have hoped for. While the poverty rate has decreased, the number of poor people has actually increased. This is pretty stark in this slide here, where on the one hand you can see the number of poor people projected up to 2030, and then on the other side the projections regarding the poverty rate, but it puts a very important dimension to the discussions about what's actually happening with growth and poverty in Africa, and obviously is an issue. And we should keep here in mind, Nigeria is going to be the biggest country in the world by 2050. So these are issues that are really and should be sitting at the core of the development economics profession. But per capita incomes in Sub-Saharan Africa are still low. You can see here how the rest of the world has grown and why Sub-Saharan Africa has evolved. So in spite of the fact there has been some growth and some poverty reduction, we are still talking about relatively low levels. Importantly, poverty is concentrating in Sub-Saharan Africa. Here's a graph that basically shows that as you move forward, you will see that Sub-Saharan Africa is essentially going to be the region where poor people live by 2030. I'm generalizing a lot, and I know that, but it's just to bring a few messages across. But importantly, and a fact that's sometimes overlooked, it's in a small number of countries. 75% of the poor, of all poor in Sub-Saharan Africa, they live in 12 countries. 85% of people below the poverty line live in just 17 countries. So we're talking about 50 plus countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, so that might be relevant to keep in mind. So the GPIR project essentially takes as a starting point that growth, though geographically widespread and sustained, has not really reached sufficiently the poorest sections of society. So there is a need to somehow revisit the growth poverty and equality relationships with options for redistributive policies. And this is illustrated in this one where we can sort of see the growth incident curves, and this brings this home very starkly when you sort of look at the period 2000, 2005 and 2010 to 26. The key objectives of the project was to use the research capacity related to this original project and then the ARC network to investigate drivers of growth and inequality in different African contexts, and then to investigate the nature of interactions between inequality and growth to measure the effects of interactions on poverty reduction at micron-macro levels. And this is across African countries in general. And then also, thirdly, to investigate the dynamics of the nexus between growth, inequality and poverty and the determinants. And then importantly, which is something that the ARC is both proud of and puts a lot of resources in, is to communicate the results to policy makers in policy briefings, policy sessions to make sure that work actually has impact. Now, let me just make an analytical point here which is sometimes overlooked. I mean, and this study is very much kind of inspired by the fact that simple cross-country extrapolations from the world development indicators data, they will not really reveal the underlying dynamics at individual specific country contexts. And that's very much sort of where part of the rationale for this project, both the original ARC project but also this more recent project. And here I'd like to make a point which I myself have been making in a number of contexts. Remember the poverty growth and inequality triangle. Some people call it the iron triangle. Book in Yong's name is associated with it. And it's often very helpful to think about the definitional relationships between poverty growth and inequality, however. And I really want to emphasize that. While there are underlying definitional relationships between these concepts, keep in mind that it is not really an iron rule. It can break down. So it's almost like marriages that you enter into and you have by definition the expectation that this marriage is going to last for life. But marriages sometimes breaks down under specific circumstances when the underlying assumptions don't hold. And there are underlying assumptions that sometimes don't hold. I mean, poor people may not cross the poverty line even if there's growth. If we ignore the bottom ones and don't do anything for them, there's not going to be any poverty reduction. Growth may not be proportional across components of absorption. Another thing that may break down in terms of trade effects may lead to relative falls and fall in relative to exports, which may then mean that the rule in quote does not stand up. And then there is mis-measurement, which is of course also here an important part. I should just for a little bit of promotion of wider work here say that quite a bit of this was actually explored in work that came out in 2018 on growth poverty, which actually explores in quite some detail this approach also and has actually 16 country case studies that you might also want to look at. So what's the coverage of the DPRR papers? It studies progress on poverty and efficiency of growth in reducing poverty. I've already referred to this. The growth in equality poverty nexus and the scope for redistribution policies, informality, social protection and inequality. The inequality of opportunity as we have just been hearing about and the nexus, stock exchange, labor markets and inequality in Africa and then inclusive business models and cash transfers. And then here you can see that I did not edit this out just to make sure that you understand that we are ending up with a bit of a composite session. It says here three of the papers presented. No, two of the papers are there and we've added in a third one. Here are some of the key findings. Some papers highlighted the installations between economic growth inequality and poverty reductions. And this is very much one of the reasons why I made this key point about the analytics that is underlying this. A second point, poverty reduction studies do not necessarily respond well to the same treatment effect. So in other words, the same policies cannot just be used indiscriminately in different contexts. The effect of policies are specific to the countries in which they're implemented. Differences, initial conditions and endowments, they matter a lot. And then the redistribution potentials in southern Africa could be impeded by high inequality. In other words, relating to the theme of this conference that inequality may be hampering development in a whole range of ways.