Join the network
Blog
Does the Kuznets Curve still matter 70 years on? Yes! Here’s whySeventy years ago, Simon Kuznets was immortalised by his finding that inequality rises first and then falls later—the hypothesis widely known as the...
Andy Sumner
Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow
Andy Sumner is Professor of International Development at King’s College London and President of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI).
He has twenty years’ international research experience using both qualitative and quantitative methods and has published 15 books and more than 70 papers, journal articles, and book chapters. His research sits in interdisciplinary Development Studies and focuses on questions related to economic development and inequality dynamics across developing countries, and in Southeast Asia in particular.
He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and the Royal Society of Arts; a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Economics and Development Studies at Padjadjaran University, Indonesia; Research Associate, University of Oxford; and Senior Non-Resident Research Fellow at the United Nations University, WIDER, Helsinki as well as the Center for Global Development, Washington DC.
He is also a former Vice President of EADI and a former council member of the Development Studies Association (DSA). Andy is an editor of the joint United Nations University and Cambridge University Press book series and co-editor of Palgrave MacMillan’s ‘Rethinking International Development’ book series. He also serves on the editorial boards of the European Journal of Development Research, Nature Sustainability, and Global Policy.
In 2012, he, together with Peter Kingstone, founded and subsequently led the International Development Institute at King’s that became the Department of International Development in 2016. Since then, Andy has been Research Director and a member of the Senior Leadership Group.
Prior to King’s, Andy was a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex where he was also Head of Teaching Programmes and a member of the Senior Management Group.
He has contributed expertise to various policy-related processes, such as the Select Committees of the House of Commons, the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and a Lancet Poverty Commission. He has been listed in the US magazine Foreign Policy’s ‘Top 100 Global Thinkers’, and in the Huffington Post’s ‘Most Influential Voices’.
19 articles, publications, projects, experts...
Filter by...
Reset all
Blog
New estimates of the cost of ending poverty: What does it mean and how much would it cost?In a new UNU-WIDER paper, which provides background for this year’s OECD Development Cooperation Report, we take a closer look at the end of poverty...
Blog
Will growth be enough to end poverty?: New Projections of the UN Sustainable Development GoalsToday, October 17th is the UN International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (you already knew that, right?). In new analysis for UNU-WIDER, we...
Blog
The Great Gatsby Curve and the Global South: Time for a more ambitious redistribution and reparations agendaThe famous 1920s book The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is the classic analogy for the American dream of meritocracy —that any person can...
Blog
Not too long and not too short: Introducing the new UNU-WIDER and Cambridge University Press series in Development EconomicsSimon Kuznets’ pipe dream was to have economic inequality data that rarely existed when he was writing. What are the pipe dreams of today’s...
Blog
Sunshine, elephants, and boomerangs: Is a dramatic rise in global income inequality looming?Global Inequality 101: Global inequality is the distribution of income across all people on the planet from the poorest to the richest. It can be...
Blog
Above or below the poverty line: Three key questions for understanding shifts in global povertyIn 2010 and the following years, there was attention to the fact that much of global poverty had shifted to middle-income countries (for example here...
Blog
35 years of research for change – what's next?: Building just societiesTo celebrate its 35th birthday, UNU-WIDER has looked back at some of its greatest achievements. As the year closes, Armida Alisjahbana, Kunal Sen...
Blog
Why all countries should contribute to ending global poverty
In 1969, richer countries agreed to commit 0.7% of their gross national income to international development aid. The world has changed since then, and...
Blog
Double dividends and mixed blessings: What would the pioneers of development economics make of new trends in developing economies?Today, we see clear trends in developing countries of a potentially troubling ‘new normal’ for economic development. We see tertiarization with rising...
Blog
Global poverty: coronavirus could drive it up for the first time since the 1990sAs COVID-19 slows in developed countries, the virus’s spread is speeding up in the developing world. Three-quarters of new cases detected each day are...
Blog
The end of poverty postponed?: Over a billion people living in poverty and a $500 million per day loss of income for the poorest people in the world could soon be realityThe COVID-19 pandemic continues to dominate headlines as the death toll rises and economies falter. However, far too little attention is being given...
Blog
Will COVID-19 lead to half a billion more people living in poverty in developing countries?The impacts of COVID-19 in developing countries are starting to be felt. The Economist went as far as to call it the ‘next calamity’, noting how...
Displaying 16 of 19 results