Using panel data from 39 countries, this paper examines the effects of financial deepening and openness to trade and foreign capital (FDI) on rural-urban inequality in Africa. Four estimations were performedu2013OLS pooled cross-section, GLS pooled cross-section, fixedeffects model and an adjusted fixed-effects specification with regional dummy terms. We have developed an alternative measure of rural-urban inequality, namely the ratio of growth in agricultural output to growth of manufacturing output. Overall, the econometric results show that openness to trade seems to contribute to reducing rural-urban inequality. However, the empirical evidence does not unambiguously delineate the nature of the impact FDI and financial deepening have on the rural-urban gap. The findings imply that there may be some support for the so-called offsetting-trend in inequality (OTI) hypothesis.
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