Comparing Wealth Polarization Over Time and Across Countries in Africa

In this paper we compare wealth polarization within and across ten African countries. Using DHS data and applying the recently developed polarization measure by Duclos et al (2004) we find that most countries included in this study experienced a sharp decrease of polarization but at different rates. Compared to inequality, polarization behaves differently sug-gesting the different sensitivities of both notions to changes in different parts of the distribution of wealth. Our decomposition of polarization by ethnic, religious and wealth groups shows that: In general, the relative contribution of the poorest population to the overall polarization is greater than their rel-ative size. In all countries the relative contribution of each ethnic or religious group to the overall polarization is very close to its relative size. ∗The author gratefully acknowledges useful comments by Sami Bibi and Rim Chatti.