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Understanding labour market inequality in Indonesia and India
Growing income inequality poses a major global challenge, even as the inequality between countries has shrunk due to rapid economic growth in nations...
Kunal Sen
Director
Professor Kunal Sen has over three decades of experience in academic and applied development economics research. He is the author of eight books and the editor of five volumes on the economics and political economy of development. Since 2019 he has served as Director of UNU-WIDER while on leave from the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, where he is a professor of development economics.
Professor Sen is a leading international expert on the political economy of growth and development. He has performed extensive research on international finance, the political economy determinants of inclusive growth, the dynamics of poverty, social exclusion, female labour force participation, and the informal sector in developing economies. His research has focused on India, East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa.
Professor Sen’s books include The Political Economy of India’s Growth Episodes (2016), The Process of Financial Liberalization in India (1997), and the Economic Restructuring in East Asia and India: Perspectives on Policy Reform (1995). His is a co-editor of Deals and Development: The Political Dynamics of Growth Episodes (2018) and The Politics of Inclusive Development (2016). And has also written twenty-five chapters in other volumes and published more than ninety peer-reviewed journal articles on topics in his field.
In addition to his work as a professor of development economics, Kunal Sen has been the Joint Research Director of the Effective States and Inclusive Development (ESID) research centre, and a Research Fellow at the Institute for Labor Economics in Bonn. He has also served in advisory roles with national governments and bilateral and multilateral development agencies, including the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), Asian Development Bank (ADB), and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).
He has been awarded the Sanjaya Lall Prize in 2006 and Dudley Seers Prize in 2003 for his publications.
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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...
Journal Article
Broken ladders? Labour market inequality in Indonesia and IndiaThis paper examines labour market inequality in Indonesia and India, using a common conceptual approach that draws on a job ladder framework. In the framework, I differentiate between self-employment and wage-informal employment and between formal...
Journal Article
Politicians, institutional incentives, and citizen welfare: evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment in IndiaWe examine how politicians and non-politicians in rural India respond to behavioural incentives. Using a modified dictator game, we vary treatments (and incentives) across the nature of interactions, the visibility of actions, and an upfront promise...
Working Paper
The political economy of structural transformation in African citiesAn important stylized fact about African economic development is the phenomenon of urbanization without structural transformation. This paper provides a political economy analysis of the lack of structural transformation in African cities, drawing on...
Journal Special Issue
Clientelist Politics and DevelopmentPolitical clientelism — which reflects strategic, discretionary, and targeted exchange of private goods and services for political support to the incumbent — has characterised distributive politics in the Global South for decades. The conditional...
Working Paper
Institutional change and persistenceThere is a broad agreement that political and economic institutions matter for long-term development. Yet relatively little is known as to how to adopt good quality institutions and reform weak or poor institutions, for which one needs to know how...
Book Chapter
Impact of COVID-19 on Employment and Earnings in GhanaPart of Book COVID-19 and the Informal Economy
Journal Article
The gendered impact of digital jobs platformsTHIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This study examines the impact of digital labor-market platforms on jobs outcomes using a randomized encouragement design embedded in a longitudinal survey of Mozambican technical-vocational college graduates. We...
Journal Article
Is there a fiscal resource curse?While it is recognised that the ability of states to raise revenues (i.e., fiscal capacity) is important for the provision of key public goods in less developed economies, it is less clear what its determinants are and what explains cross-country...
Book
COVID-19 and the Informal EconomyA key challenge for the post-COVID global economy is whether the disproportionate impact of the crisis on informal workers, who form the majority of the world’s workforce, will be acknowledged. Or whether harmful and negative stereotypes will persist...
Working Paper
Labour market inequality in two Asian giantsWe examine the nature of labour market inequality in Indonesia and India, using a common conceptual approach drawing from the job ladder framework. In the framework, we differentiate between self-employment and wage-informal and between formal, upper...
Blog
How India’s economy has fared under ten years of Narendra Modi
More than 960 million Indians will head to the polls in the world’s biggest election between April 19 and early June. The ruling Bharatiya Janata...
Blog
Nigeria: botched economic reforms plunge the country into crisisNigeria, Africa’s largest economy, is facing an economic crisis. From a botched currency redesign to the removal of fuel subsidies and a currency...
Policy Brief
How to create decent work for womenDespite advancements for gender equality in some spheres, labour market outcomes for women continue to be worse than for men. Gender gaps in pay, labour force participation rates, and measures of job quality are stubbornly persistent and continue to...
Journal Article
Payment delay in workfare programmes and household welfareUsing the lens of a life-cycle model, we argue that an administrative failure of a wage payment delay in a workfare programme could adversely affect the welfare of the poor through two channels. First, it imposes an implicit consumption tax on the...
Journal Article
Women’s Work – Routes to Social and Economic EmpowermentPart of Journal Special Issue Women’s Work
Journal Special Issue
Women’s WorkIn recent decades, trends in female labour force participation rates have been very heterogeneous across developing countries, despite widespread economic growth, fertility decline, and narrowing gender gaps in education.However, globally, gender...
Blog
Financing development goals in times of crisisPursuing the global development agenda will require genuine commitment from political leaders and significant stepping-up of government efforts. But...
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