Economic Growth and Income Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa

Economies of Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries have been growing slowly in recent time. Economic growth is thought to affect inequality but not much is known about the nature of such relationship in SSA and there is no concordance among the few available. This paper examined the relationship between economic growth and inequality in the region using data from 1990 to 2017estimated with the Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Model and Granger Causality. Hausman’s test suggested the superiority of the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) over the Mean Group (MG) Model. The PMG results showed that economic growth had significant and negative effect on income inequality (proxy by GINI-coefficient) in the long run suggesting a state of the later part of the Kuznet curve. This is in addition to the negative effect in the short run which is contrary to the theory. Furthermore, the result of the Granger Causality test revealed evidence of unidirectional relationship running from economic growth to income inequality in the region. Therefore, the study recommended that governments of Sub-Saharan African countries should implement policies and programmes capable of sustaining and improving inclusive growth in order to avoid high income inequality in the region.