UNU-WIDER at 40: The power of shared knowledge

On 20 June 1984, after years of consultations and deliberations, UNU-WIDER was born in Helsinki through the signing of an agreement between the government of Finland and the United Nations University. The Institute was created to provide a wider perspective on the big economic and development challenges of the time, engaging academics and policy makers across geographies, areas of work, and generations. 

With the first board meeting in May 1985, UNU-WIDER’s unique purpose, mission, and vision were finalized. The first UNU-WIDER Director, Lal Jayawardena kicked off the institute’s operations. 

With its first project Stabilization and Adjustment Policies and Programmes, UNU-WIDER was one of first to investigate and outline the concerns on the IMF structural adjustment programmes in the Global South. This research continues to impact development discussions, with calls for change continuing to reverberate today.

Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze publish ground-breaking book which challenge the idea that famine is caused by a lack of food, instead arguing that it is driven by individuals’ inability to afford it. It broadened public understanding of hunger, promoting a definition that encompasses social as well as biological disadvantages.

UNU-WIDER launched the WIDER Annual Lecture Series in 1997 with Nobel-prize winner Professor Douglass C. North. Since then, UNU-WIDER hosts annual lectures featuring renowned development economists. The WIDER Annual Lecture 29 will be given by Abhijit Banerjee. 

The World Income Inequality Database (WIID) is one of the pioneering databases in the field of income inequality research. It has always been freely available online. The WIID  is an essential resource for advancing knowledge and informing debates around income distribution and economic justice globally.

The biennial WIDER Development Conferences were introduced by UNU-WIDER Director Anthony Shorrocks in 2001. They bring together researchers from varied disciplines and people involved in policy processes to debate the big issues of our time. 

UNU-WIDER released the world’s first rigorous estimate of the global wealth distribution. This research gathered so much media attention that it was featured in over 500 media outlets in the first week and was downloaded so frequently that the traffic crashed the UNU-WIDER website twice in one day.

In 2012 the Institute started a decade long dive into the new patterns of structural transformation in the Global South, especially in the African continent. The body of work includes the Made in Africa book, and the pathbreaking and free to use GGDC/UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database (ETD) which provides comprehensive, long-term, and internationally comparable sectoral data on employment and productivity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. 

The programme produced 247 original studies from 300 researchers from 59 countries on what works and does not work in foreign aid. It transformed how UNU-WIDER conceptualized knowledge mobilization with the introduction of research and policy briefs. 

UNU-WIDER teamed up with the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Mozambique, the Mozambican University of Eduardo Mondlane and the University of Copenhagen Development Economics Research Group to create the Inclusive Growth in Mozambique (IGM) programme. For the first time in its history, UNU-WIDER was permanently in a Global South country to conduct policy relevant research for Mozambique. 

Southern Africa – Towards Inclusive Economic Development (SA-TIED) was born to support policymaking in South Africa by working closely with researchers and the National Treasury to close knowledge gaps crucial to achieve inclusive growth and economic transformation. 

Once the COVID-19 pandemic hit, UNU-WIDER quickly redirected its work to answer the most pressing question for development. Its Working Paper Estimates of the impact of COVID-19 on global poverty, featured in leading media outlets including the The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Independent. It has since featured in over 70 news articles, including Al Jazeera, The Economist, and Devex. Since its publication, it remains one of the most downloaded working paper on the website.

The Domestic Revenue Mobilization Programme allowed UNU-WIDER to deepen its collaboration with Revenue Authorities in Africa on administrative tax research. This led to the creation of the first tax data labs in Africa.