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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...
Ravi Kanbur
Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow
Ravi Kanbur researches and teaches in development economics, public economics, and economic theory at Cornell University. He has served on the senior staff of the World Bank including as Chief Economist for Africa. He has also published in leading economics journals, including Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Economic Theory, and Economic Journal.
He served as Co-Chair of the Food System Economics Commission, Chair of the Board of United Nations University–World Institute for Development Economics Research, member of the OECD High Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance, President of the Human Development and Capability Association, President of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, member of the High Level Advisory Council of the Climate Justice Dialogue, Co-Chair of the Scientific Council of the International Panel on Social Progress, and member of the Core Group of the Commission on Global Poverty.
Professor Kanbur was a member of the UNU-WIDER Board 2009–2019. As a UNU-WIDER Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow, he is involved in the Inequality and structural transformation – Kuznets at 70 project.
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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...
Book Chapter
Reflections on Informal Employment, COVID-19, and the FuturePart of Book COVID-19 and the Informal Economy
Working Paper
How should an optimal tax system react to a crisis?The COVID-19 pandemic increased public debt and changed the income distribution in many countries. We use a numerical simulation approach to derive optimal nonlinear marginal tax rates for the pre-crisis and crisis periods. We contribute to the...
Working Paper
Comparing the poverty-reduction efficiency of targeted versus universal benefits amid crisesThis study evaluates which type of benefit—a universal benefit, a proxy mean-tested benefit, or a categorical benefit— better cushions the poverty effects of income shocks in a developing economy. We compare the effectiveness of the three benefit...
Working Paper
Employer power and employment in developing countriesThe issue of employer power is underemphasized in the development literature. The default model is usually one of competitive labour markets. This assumption matters for analysis and policy prescription. There is growing evidence that the competitive...
Journal Article
Promoting education under distortionary taxationA common claim in the policy discourse is that a government wishing to achieve equality of opportunity should use public provision of education for equalisation of opportunities rather than income taxation, which only equalizes incomes. We develop a...
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
Who demands labour (de)regulation in the developing world?Contrary to the predictions of the insider–outsider model, we show that the large majority of outsiders in developing countries support, rather than oppose, protective labour regulations. This evidence holds across countries in different regions...
Working Paper
In praise of snapshotsThe conventional justification for moving from income distribution to intergenerational mobility analysis is that the movie encompasses the snapshot and is normatively superior as the basis for assessing policy. Such a perspective underpins many an...
Working Paper
Promoting education under distortionary taxationHow does the public provision of education and the deployment of distortionary tax and subsidy instruments differ when the government’s objective is conventional welfarist compared to when the objective is the non-welfarist one of equality of...
Working Paper
Gunnar Myrdal and Asian Drama in contextThis paper attempts to understand Asian Drama in the context of the development debates of its time, and in terms of the sensibilities that Gunnar Myrdal—the brilliant economic theorist and philosopher of knowledge, and Swedish politician—brought to...
Journal Article
Optimal taxation and public provision for poverty reductionThe existing literature on optimal taxation typically assumes there exists a capacity to implement complex tax schemes, which is not necessarily the case for many developing countries. We examine the determinants of optimal redistributive policies in...
Working Paper
Optimal taxation and public provision for poverty reductionThe existing literature on optimal taxation typically assumes there exists a capacity to implement complex tax schemes, which is not necessarily the case for many developing countries. We examine the determinants of optimal redistributive policies in...
Journal Article
Introduction: poverty, development, and behavioral economicsPart of Journal Special Issue Poverty, Development, and Behavioral Economics
Journal Article
Poverty and Welfare Measurement on the Basis of Prospect TheoryPart of Journal Special Issue Poverty, Development, and Behavioral Economics
Journal Special Issue
Poverty, Development, and Behavioral EconomicsThis Special Issue brings together papers from UNU-WIDER Conference on Poverty and Behavioural Economics that were accepted after the peer review process of the journal. The eight papers in this Special Issue all share the objective of exploring the...
Working Paper
Poverty and Welfare Measurement on the Basis of Prospect TheoryThis paper examines the measurement of social welfare, poverty and inequality taking into account features that have been found to be important welfare determinants in behavioural economics. Most notably, we incorporate reference-dependence, loss...
Book
Latin American Urban Development into the 21st CenturyAccording to UN-Habitat, Latin America is the most urbanized region in the world. Over three quarters of its population resided in cities at the turn of the twenty-first century, a proportion that is estimated will rise to almost 85 per cent by 2030...
Book
Urbanization and Development in AsiaThe 20th century was one of rapid urbanization—that is urbanization by urban growth, and by rural-to-urban migration. By the dawn of the 21st century, for the first time in human history, more than half of the world’s population was living in urban...
Journal Article
Latin American Urban Development into the Twenty-first CenturyThis article argues for a more systemic engagement with Latin American cities, contending that it is necessary to reconsider their unity in order to nuance the ‘fractured cities’ perspective that has widely come to epitomize the contemporary urban...
Blog
Beyond the Urban Tipping PointJo Beall, Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis, and Ravi Kanbur By many estimates, the world has just crossed the point where more than half the global population...
Working Paper
Latin American Urban Development into the 21st CenturyThis paper argues for a more systemic engagement with Latin American cities, contending it is necessary to reconsider their unity in order to nuance the ‘fractured cities’ perspective that has widely come to epitomise the contemporary urban moment in...
Book
Urbanization and DevelopmentThis volume presents a significant new collection of multidisciplinary papers focused on urbanization and its implications for development. It raises four questions: What is so special about the urban context? Why is urbanization and urban growth...
Journal Special Issue
African Development in an Urban WorldIn 2007 the number of urban inhabitants will surpass rural dwellers as a percentage of the total world population. By 2030 the proportion of people living in cities globally is expected to reach 61%, with almost 80% of urban dwellers living in less...
Book
Linking the Formal and Informal EconomyPAPERBACK: The concepts of formal and informal remain central to the theory and practice of development more than half a century after they were introduced into the debate. They help structure the way that statistical services collect data on the...
Book
Linking the Formal and Informal EconomyThe concepts of formal and informal remain central to the theory and practice of development more than half a century after they were introduced into the debate. They help structure the way that statistical services collect data on the economies of...
Book
Informal Labour Markets and DevelopmentThis book presents significant new research on the informal labour markets of developing countries. Examining the critical role of informal labour markets in allowing countries to adjust successfully to the forces of globalization, this volume also...
Blog
Beyond Formality and Informalityby Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis, Ravi Kanbur, and Elinor OstromThe constructed opposites of formality and informality have dominated the development...
Book
Spatial Disparities in Human DevelopmentWhat exactly is spatial inequality? Why does it matter? And what should be the policy response to it? These questions have become important in recent years as the spatial dimensions of inequality have begun to attract considerable policy interest. In...
Policy Brief
Rising Spatial Disparities and DevelopmentThe UNU-WIDER project on 'Spatial Disparities in Human Development' has collected and analyzed evidence on the extent of spatial inequalities within developing countries. The studies find that spatial inequalities are high, with disparities between...
Journal Article
Symposium on Spatial Inequality in Latin AmericaPart of Journal Special Issue Symposium on Spatial Inequality in Latin America
Journal Special Issue
Symposium on Spatial Inequality in Latin AmericaMany developing and transition countries have considerable regional variation in average household income, poverty, and in health and educational status. National human development indicators can therefore mislead policy-makers when large regional...
Journal Article
Fifty Years of Regional Inequality in ChinaPart of Journal Special Issue Spatial Inequality and Development in Asia
Journal Article
Introduction to the Special Issue: Spatial Inequality and Development in AsiaPart of Journal Special Issue Spatial Inequality and Development in Asia
Journal Special Issue
Spatial Inequality and Development in AsiaMany developing and transition countries have considerable regional variation in average household income, poverty, and in health and educational status. National human development indicators can therefore mislead policy-makers when large regional...
Journal Article
Migration Selectivity and the Evolution of Spatial InequalityPart of Journal Special Issue Spatial Inequality and Development
Book
Spatial Inequality and DevelopmentWhat exactly is spatial inequality? Why does it matter? And what should be the policy response to it? These questions have become important in recent years as the spatial dimensions of inequality have begun to attract considerable policy interest. In...
Journal Special Issue
Spatial Inequality and DevelopmentMany developing and transition countries have considerable regional variation in average household income, poverty, and in health and educational status. National human development indicators can therefore mislead policy-makers when large regional...
Working Paper
Fifty Years of Regional Inequality in ChinaThis paper constructs and analyses a long-run time-series for regional inequality in China from the Communist Revolution to the present. There have been three peaks of inequality in the last fifty years, coinciding with the Great Famine of the late...
Journal Special Issue
Spatial Issues in AfricaMany developing and transition countries have considerable regional variation in average household income, poverty, and in health and educational status. National human development indicators can therefore mislead policy-makers when large regional...
Blog
Conceptual Challenges in Poverty and Inequality
by Ravi KanburThe last 30 years in the analysis of inequality and poverty has seen a phase of conceptual advancement (1970-mid 1980s) followed by a...
Blog
The End of History
by Ravi Kanbur When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it was famously heralded as "the end of history" the end of all "big" debates on the organization of...
Displaying 68 of 68 results