5 - Wages and Poverty: From Roots of Poverty to Trajectories of Living Standards

Summary

There is a long history of poverty in Africa. However, the most influential narrative of African poverty tells a story that takes place over a very short period of time. The history of Africa by numbers as told by the World Bank starts in the 1980s with the first Living Standards Measurement Surveys. The story is also a very narrow one. In general, there is a disconnect between the theoretical and historical underpinnings of how we understand and define poverty in Africa and how it has been quantified in practice. This chapter reviews how particular types of poverty knowledge have gained prominence and thus shaped the historical narrative of poverty in Africa. It summarizes recent work on living standards. New sources on real wages and evidence from anthropometric research allow perspectives on trends and relative levels in living standards back to the 1890s and until today. This raises the possibility that the narrative of African poverty that was born in the 1980s is a historical anomaly. Such a perspective may also offer a better perspective from which to reach a historical comparative verdict on the more recent “Africa rising” narrative.