Abstract
Developing countries, and particularly African countries, are characterised by poverty and inequality. Emerging corpus of knowledge demonstrates that innovation is a critical component of reducing poverty and inequality. In recent years, the ICT revolution is promoting the culture of innovation in many African countries. This reality raises questions about the real impact of innovations on poverty and inequality in Africa. Despite the amount of important work on Africa, particularly on poverty, little work has been done on the impact of innovations on poverty. In this chapter, we examine the relationship between innovation and inequality using the Gini index and the global innovation index to understand the relationship between inequality and innovation and to explain the determinants of this relationship by focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa. We employ a meta-analysis of the innovation landscape in Africa from the 1980s to the present day. The resulting changes in the socio-economic sphere provide an overview of the situation that will be confirmed or disproved by an analysis of the data on innovation indices and the Gini index.
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Notes
- 1.
Nevertheless, this rate is very different in each country in SSA. For example, in 2018, it was greater than 4% in countries such as the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Kenya and Uganda but it was 1.9% in Nigeria and only 0.8% in South Africa (Calderon et al. 2019).
- 2.
X represents the inequality variable (Gini Index) and Y the innovation variable (Innovation Index). CP1(X) refers to the first major component of the inequality index (extracted from the inequality component analysis), and CP1(Y) refers to the first major component of the innovation index (extracted from the inequality component analysis). PCA refers to the main component analysis.
- 3.
In this graph, innovation and inequality represent the active variables and countries represent the active observations. The different colours represent the nature of the correlation profile: yellow refers to the profile of category 1; green refers to the profile of category 2; blue refers to the profile of category 3; and orange refers to the profile of category 4.
- 4.
In this graph, innovation and unemployment represent the active variables and countries represent the active observations. The different colours represent the nature of the correlation profile: green refers to the profile of category 1; orange refers to the profile of category 2; yellow refers to the profile of category 3; and blue refers to the profile of category 4.
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Ibrahima, B., Okem, A.E., Reysz, J. (2023). An Investigation into the Nexus Between Innovation and Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa. In: Mtapuri, O. (eds) Poverty, Inequality, and Innovation in the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21841-5_16
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