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Celebrating 40 Years of UNU-WIDER

In 2025, UNU-WIDER completes four decades of work. Starting as a small think-tank in relatively remote Helsinki, it has grown into a global institute, with a network of scholars and practitioners that spans the globe. 

The original vision behind UNU-WIDER was to develop an institute with ‘a research capability that was sensitive to the needs of the Third World.’ Over the past forty years, UNU-WIDER’s work has proven to open new arenas of inquiry, meet the demands for evidence coming from Global South countries, and maintain a high degree of rigor and academic independence. Our 40th anniversary is an opportune moment to reflect on UNU-WIDER’s remarkable journey and contributions to the field of development economics. 

Challenging conventional thinking

One of the hallmarks of UNU-WIDER's work has been its vision and ability to provide alternative perspectives on economic development. Since its inception the institute has challenged orthodoxies and taken a wider—as its name suggests—view of the development process, making immense contributions that have had lasting impacts on development thinking and policy. 

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, UNU-WIDER played an important role in the development of the capability approach, which in the words of the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, was ‘concerned with ... advancing the richness of human life, rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live, which is only a part of it.’   

This approach was very much a core component of the thinking behind UNDP’s Human Development Report and the establishment of the Human Development Index, widely used by national governments today to measure progress in the broader dimensions of development, beyond GDP.

In the in the late 80s and early 90s we provided some of the earliest critical assessments of IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programmes, advocating for alternative approaches that prevent large-scale impoverishment. This work delivered concrete, comparative evidence on the stabilization experiences of several countries to the table, factual evidence which supported a chorus of voices pushing for reform. As such, the work influenced the changes in IMF and World Bank programmes that emphasized a more holistic approach to structural adjustment.

As the transitions from communism in former Eastern Bloc countries revealed the potential for inequality to engender human suffering and disrupt the economic development process, UNU-WIDER became an early supporter of inequality studies. The recognition of the threat posed by growing inequality led to influential publications on wealth inequality and UNU-WIDER’s adoption of the initial version of the World Income Inequality Database (WIID). The WIID has been kept alive for more than 20 years now and today is the most comprehensive database on income inequality across countries in the world.

In the 2000s, with the iconic Making Peace Work conference in 2004, UNU-WIDER embarked on ambitious research into the causes of conflict and the challenges of post-conflict reconstruction. This work has become increasingly relevant in the institute’s current research as armed conflict and conflict recovery continues to affect a significant portion of the world's population, leading to poverty, food insecurity, and deprivation.

From the 2010s onwards, UNU-WIDER has focused on issues such as economic transformation, job creation, and domestic revenue mobilization (strengthening public finances to support investments in national development and human wellbeing). Through landmark publications and engagement with revenue authorities in Africa, UNU-WIDER has made significant contributions to policymaking on structural transformation, inequality, informality, and how developing countries can increase the fiscal space to make critical investments necessary for achieving the SDGs.

The unique role of UNU-WIDER

UNU-WIDER is unique in its multifaceted role as a think-tank, research institute, capacity-development organization, UN agency, and trusted partner for governments. As a think-tank, it provides policy processes with up-to-date, rigorous evidence and data demonstrating the transformative power of knowledge which we firmly believe in. 

As a research institute, UNU-WIDER undertakes agenda-setting, policy-oriented scholarly research. Our publications have made remarkable contributions to the field of development economics, including as they do the iconic WIDER Studies in Development Economics with Oxford University Press and the Elements in Development Economics Series with Cambridge University Press, alongside a steady stream of articles in peer-reviewed journals and our well-respected WIDER Working Paper series, which releases scores of papers every year.

Co-creation of knowledge is an integral part of UNU-WIDER's DNA. The institute connects people from different parts of the world, different disciplines, and different generations to do research on those big questions from different perspectives. By developing the capacity of researchers and policy analysts in the Global North and South, UNU-WIDER provides a solid foundation for future research.

As a UN agency, the Institute contributes to efforts at resolving the pressing global problems of human survival, development, and welfare that are the concern of the United Nations and its Member States. It is arguably the most credible voice on development economics in the United Nations system, providing a powerful and independent voice in debates around major UN initiatives such as Agenda 2030 and the forthcoming Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development.

Finally, UNU-WIDER has extensive country engagements in many Global South countries, and most notably in Mozambique and South Africa. It is the trusted partner for governments in Global South countries, helping them navigate complex policy problems and create tailored approaches to address the challenges of their specific settings. 

Each of these features of UNU-WIDER’s work alone do not make it unique – it is the combination of these features that does. In other words, UNU-WIDER’s comparative advantage is in the way it effortlessly combines its think tank capacity, its role as a purveyor of high-quality agenda-setting research, its position as a UN agency, in the co-creation of knowledge with researchers and practitioners, and in its in-country engagements with governments in the Global South.

The future of UNU-WIDER

We are living in a world where Global South countries do not have an equal voice in the global arena, and many of the poorest countries remain marginalized in global policy debates around finance, trade, and economic governance. We also see an environment where credible facts are often in short supply, with the spread of false information through populist leaders and social media. 

By articulating and augmenting the research and expert voices of the less well-off countries, the institute's future relevance is in ensuring that the voices of the Global South are heard in global forums now and in the future.  By continuing to marshall and examine facts, UNU-WIDER can play a catalytic role in providing the evidence base for setting and illuminating the policy choices for national governments in the Global South.

UNU-WIDER will continue as it always has the work of supporting the next generation of development economists in the Global South.  As we celebrate this milestone, we look forward to the institute's continued efforts in addressing the pressing challenges of our times and in shaping a more equitable and sustainable future.

Kunal Sen is Director of UNU-WIDER.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author(s), and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Institute or the United Nations University, nor the programme/project donors.