This is from the latest installment in the debate over whether Rwanda’s official statistics on economic growth and poverty reduction can be believed:

All poverty lines yield similar trends when used consistently over time, indicating that poverty increased between 5% and 7% points between 2010 and 2014. All changes are statistically significant at the 5% level.

It should be noted that our results differ from those obtained by simply updating the poverty line for inflation using CPI data, as was done by NISR in their 2016 trend report (NISR, 2016). In principle, if the data are of good quality and sufficiently disaggregated, both methods should be equivalent and should not yield significantly different results. This therefore raises questions about the quality / reliability of official CPI data, and/or the quality of price data collected by the EICV. In either case, this would undermine our ability to correctly estimate poverty levels in Rwanda. The discrepancies found here should invite us to more closely scrutinize official statistics coming out of the Rwandan statistical office. GDP growth figures appear to be incompatible with the findings of the EICV survey, given than agriculture still accounts for about one third of GDP and two thirds of the labour force.

More on this here.

The idea that Rwanda is growing without reducing poverty is concerning because it means that the implicit bargain inherent in the country’s political economy — growth in exchange for controlled political development — is not working. It is also likely that the benefits of the country’s recent impressive economic performance are accruing to only a few people, perhaps along ethnic lines. That, again, would be a source of serious concern.

If these data are to be believed, one wonders if Paul Kagame’s refusal to step down is informed by an understanding that the implicit bargain might not hold if he steps down because it was all a mirage to begin with.

More generally, what this means is that Rwanda is developing like any other poor country in which the initial beginnings of rapid growth will be accompanied by rising inequality. The singular problem for Rwanda, of course, is that its history and political economy mean that following this trajectory comes with serious risks to continued political stability.