And the Bright Spot is--Africa?

This one is getting buzz all over the place, but I just last month repeated the conventional wisdom about Africa being a basket case so I might as well join the parade. That is: we have a report saying that African Poverty is Falling...Much Faster than You Think! (link). And it's not just Botswana:

African poverty reduction is remarkably general: it cannot be explained by a large country, or even by a single set of countries possessing some beneficial geographical or historical characteristic. All classes of countries, including those with disadvantageous geography and history, experience reductions in poverty. In particular, poverty fell for both landlocked as well as coastal countries; for
mineral‐rich as well as mineral‐poor countries; for countries with favorable or with unfavorable agriculture; for countries regardless of colonial origin; and for countries with below‐ or above median slave exports per capita during the African slave trade.

The paper can be read as a challenge to, inter alia the work of Paul Collier, whose The Bottom Billion is perhaps the most widely cited recent work on world poverty and inequality (I reviewed it here). One thing the paper doesn't do is attempt to identify just why things have gone so (counterintuitively) well in Africa and in particular, why or how Africa avoided the "resource trap," whereby resource wealth supposedly concentrates in the elites.

The authors back up their case with evidence that the Gini inequality measure for Africa has fallen from about 0.66 to about 0.63--a level not seen since the ealry 70s. That's unambiguous good news but it is worth remembering that the US Gini number typically lies in the 40s and Europe's, in the low 30s.