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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’.
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Journal Article
Is the era of declining global income inequality over?This study examines the trajectory of global income inequality since 1981. Commonly used (relative) definitions indicate a decline in global inequality since the late 1980s. Looking ahead, it has been intuited that the influence of China's economic...
Journal Article
Will the poverty-related UN Sustainable Development Goals be met?In this paper, we discuss the literature and consider the historical relationship between growth and a set of poverty-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically extreme monetary poverty, undernutrition, stunting, child mortality...
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...
Working Paper
New estimates of the cost of ending poverty and its global distributionThis paper makes new estimates of the cost of ending poverty and the global distribution of both the cost and poverty itself. First, the paper discusses definitions of ‘ending’ poverty, arguing that there is an overemphasis (e.g. SDG 1) on the...
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...
Working Paper
Will economic growth be sufficient to end global poverty?In this paper, we present new projections for a range of global poverty-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically, extreme monetary poverty, undernutrition, stunting, child mortality, maternal mortality, and access to clean water and...
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...
Book
The Developer’s DilemmaThe developer’s dilemma is thus: developing countries seek inclusive economic development — i.e., structural transformation — sufficiently broad-based to raise the income of the poor. Inclusive economic growth requires falling income inequality to...
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...
Working Paper
The global inequality boomerangThis paper focuses on the past and potential future evolution of income (or consumption) inequality in the world over the period 1981–2040. Inequality in the world has fallen by most common definitions since the late 1980s, and this is largely due to...
Working Paper
Whose intergenerational mobility?Various scholars have estimated levels of intergenerational mobility in OECD countries. Fewer estimates are available for developing countries, where mobility arguably matters more due to starker differences in living standards. This paper presents...
Journal Article
Measuring global poverty before and during the pandemicThe contribution of this study is to question the ‘official’ estimates of global monetary poverty up to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue there is a political economy of overoptimism in the measurement of global poverty. Specifically, we...
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...
Journal Article
Bringing state-owned entities back into the industrial policy debateDiscussions on the developing world's industrial policies have largely neglected the role of state-owned entities. This paper argues that the resurgence of state capitalism has been, in part, the response of developing countries to the recent pattern...
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...
Journal Article
A proposal for a new universal development commitmentMost developed countries have accepted, in principle at least, the 50‐year‐old commitment of contributing 0.7 per cent of gross national income to supporting the development of developing countries. But what if all countries made a universal...
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...
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