Response to 'Polarization and poverty reduction in Africa: The devil is in the choice of equivalence relation'

Thank you very much for asking us to respond to this very interesting paper and give the opportunity to shed additional light on a debate that we find extremely relevant for Africa. We take Partridge's (2021) criticism as an opportunity to reflect not only on the methodology we suggest but also on the broad message we want to convey. The paper questions the validity of our results (Clementi et al., 2018, 2019) by basically attempting to confute two claims made in our work. Claim 1 states that our work can account for "distributional changes that went undetected by standard inequality measures", and Claim 2 states that "there was an increase in polarization caused by a 'hollowing out' of the middle and a 'concentration' in the lowest and highest deciles of the distribution". The author attempts to disprove both claims, concluding that we misinterpreted our results ...