Pro-Poor Growth in Mozambique: An Exploration of its Income and Non-Income Dimensions

The purpose of this study is to assess the incidence of economic growth and social attainment in Mozambique during the 1990s. There is a growing international debate about the impact of growth on poverty and inequality. International development goals endorsed by the United Nations, the World Bank, and governments from around the world emphasize achieving quantitative targets across various dimensions of welfare including, but not limited to, income. Therefore, efforts at evaluating growth must go beyond aggregates and focus on the experience of the poor during the growth process. The methodology used here is based on growth incidence curves first developed by Ravallion and Chen (2003, 267) for income growth rates and extended to social welfare (e.g., education level, vaccination rates) indicators by Klasen (2005). Growth incidence curves show the incidence of growth across the population distribution. They have the benefit of describing how the gains from growth are distributed during the growth process. Using data from Mozambique’s 1997 and 2003 household living conditions surveys, a growth incidence curve is calculated for Mozambique using consumption as a welfare metric. Data limitations do not allow non-income growth incidence curves to be calculated; however, an approach combining quantile distributions and kernel regressions using education data is taken in the spirit of the non-income growth incidence curve approach. Consumption growth in Mozambique is demonstrated to have been pro-poor by some definitions but not others. The general conclusion about the growth of educational attainment is that it has been pro-poor as well