Andy Sumner

Andy Sumner
Nationality British
Field International development
Influences Simon Kuznets, W. Arthur Lewis, Amartya Sen, Dudley Seers, Hans Singer

Andy Sumner is an inter-disciplinary development economist, who has published extensively on poverty, inequality and economic development including nine books.

His research is at the interface of development studies and development economics, with a particular focus on middle-income and emerging economies.[1] He has been listed by Foreign Policy magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers and Devex website’s ‘Global Development Leaders’ for his work on the ‘new bottom billion’ about poverty in middle-income countries.[2][3]

Sumner is a Reader in International Development in the Department of International Development, King's College London.[4] He holds associate positions at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, University of Oxford, the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C, UNU-WIDER and Padjadjaran University, Indonesia.[5][6]

He was Co-Director of King’s International Development Institute, King’s College London from 2012-2016. Prior to King’s he was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. From 1998 to 2014 Sumner served as council member of the British Development Studies Association (DSA) and from 2008 to 2014 he was UK representative and Vice President of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI).[7] Sumner is Deputy Editor and an Editorial Board Member of the journal Global Policy.[8] He is also a board member of the Journal of International Development, and of the European Journal of Development Research and book series co-editor for Palgrave Macmillan’s 'Rethinking International Development'.

Work

Sumner's research focuses on:

  1. global poverty and inequality;
  2. inclusive growth and structural transformation in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand);
  3. the future of foreign aid and development cooperation in middle-income developing countries.

A central theme of his work is the persistence of poverty in middle-income countries and the implications of national inequality for poverty and theories of poverty. His research seeks to reconnect the analysis of poverty with the study of economic development and structural transformation.

In recent years his research has focused on the fact that about a billion people or three-quarters of the poor live in middle-income countries which he termed the “new bottom billion”. This finding raised questions about the distributional patterns of economic growth, the divorce of much foreign aid from world poverty and about the dominant country analytical categories. It has contributed to a changed understanding of the geographical distribution of global poverty.[9] His work seeks to challenge the orthodox view that absolute poverty is necessarily minimal or residual at higher levels of per capita income; rather, that absolute poverty is a distributional outcome of specific patterns of economic development and welfare regimes.

Together with Alex Cobham he popularized the Palma ratio as a new measure of income or consumption inequality.[10][11][12][13]

His work on poverty in middle-income countries has been discussed in media outlets such as The Economist, The Guardian and the Voice of America. His work on measuring inequality and the Palma Ratio has been discussed by BBC News and the Washington Post.

Publications

Selected Books

Selected Articles

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Andy Sumner - Biography". King's College London. Retrieved 4 May 2015.
  2. ↑ "The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers 2011". Foreign Policy. Retrieved 4 May 2015.
  3. ↑ "London's 40 under 40 International Development Leaders". Devex. Retrieved 4 May 2015.
  4. ↑ "Andy Sumner - Biography". King's College London. Retrieved 4 May 2015.
  5. ↑ "Research Associates and Advisors - Andy Sumner". OPHI. Retrieved 4 May 2015.
  6. ↑ "Experts - Andy Sumner". CGD. Retrieved 4 May 2015.
  7. ↑ "Curriculum Vitae - Andy Sumner" (PDF). IDS. Retrieved 4 May 2015.
  8. ↑ "Andy Sumner - Deputy Executive Editor". Global Policy. Retrieved 4 May 2015.
  9. ↑ "International aid, but not as we know it". The Guardian. Retrieved 4 May 2015.
  10. ↑ "Map: How the world's countries compare on income inequality (the U.S. ranks below Nigeria)". The Washington Post. Retrieved 4 May 2015.
  11. ↑ "Who, What, Why: What is the Gini coefficient?". BBC News. Retrieved 4 May 2015.
  12. ↑ "On inequality, let's do the Palma (because the Gini is so last century)". Oxfam. Retrieved 4 May 2015.
  13. ↑ "Palma vs Gini: measuring post-2015 inequality". The Broker. Retrieved 4 May 2015.

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/28/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.