Dissertation presented and defended for the award of the degree of Doctor of Economic Sciences

By

Joel MUNKENI MAFUKU TIER

Composition of the jury
President: Professor Jean-Pierre BOSONGA BOFEKI LOUNGA

Secretary: Professor André NYEMBWE MUSUNGAYI

Promoter: Professor François KABUYA KALALA
Co-promoter: Professor Léonard KABEYA TSHIKUKU

Full member:

Professor Claude SUMATA MOTUKULA

Alternate members: Professor Emile NGOY KASONGO

Professor Phocas PFUNGA PFUNGA

Academic Year 2022-2023

SUMMARY OF THE DOCTORAL THESIS

Development policies implemented worldwide during the 1980s placed greater emphasis on structural adjustment to stabilize the economy and boost growth. These policies paid little attention to the fight against poverty, which had previously been considered the logical consequence of successful structural adjustment.
This has led to a worsening of poverty, inequality, and vulnerability among populations in developing countries, including the ROC. Poverty, as identified, is believed to carry immeasurable harms that force people to lead lives unworthy of human beings. These harms include hunger, stunted growth of children, exclusion from school, high child mortality, infectious diseases, and lack of access to water and sanitation.
To address this in the ROC in particular, this doctoral study has chosen to place budgetary management and growth at the heart of the protocol for combating poverty by examining the period from 1980 to 2020.
The hypothetico-deductive approach used for this purpose consisted of: (i) constructing tables and graphs relating to the evolution of variables selected in the framework of this study to describe their upstream behavior, (ii) experimenting with a normal VAR model combined with a structural VAR model to test the links and the degree of dependence that exist between the fight against poverty and the variables that are supposed to explain it, and (iii) arriving at the interpretation of the results and the alignment of the tools necessary for the convergence of policies to fight against poverty.
The analysis also used a normative approach, in the phase of economic policy proposals, in order to clearly trace the connection of tools and the convergence of policies. This "connection-convergence" paradigm was introduced here in an attempt to provide a sustainable solution to the problem.
The results of the data analysis show that economic growth and, to a lesser extent, public spending are important vectors in the fight against poverty in the short and medium term. In the long term, the contribution of these two tools is much more significant, although they do not succeed in definitively eradicating this scourge.
We therefore come to consider that the poor quality of growth and budgetary management, reputed to be unhealthy in the ROC, would be at the root of these disappointments. The analysis also looked at the limitations of the model used, judging it to be more technocratic than sociological.
To this end, solutions were presented that would allow for its future improvement. These solutions chose to place the dialectical method at the center of the process in order to circumvent the aforementioned limitations. This made it possible to make recommendations and identify future prospects to provide a sustainable solution to the problem.