By Saumik Paul and Andy Sumner
Understanding inequality trends remains central to assessing both development progress and global justice. Two major dimensions—inequality between countries and inequality within countries—have long structured debate in Development Studies. In the 1990s, Lant Pritchett’s provocation that the world was experiencing “divergence, big time” captured the mood of an era in which income gaps between countries were seen to be widening. More recently, the “converging-divergence” thesis proposed by Horner and Hulme in late 2010s argued that while inequality between countries was declining, inequality within countries was on the rise. In this blog, we argue that something new has emerged over the last decade akin to a flatlining or plateauing.
Continue reading “Convergence, Divergence, Flatlining or Plateau: What has Happened to Inequality between and within Countries over the Last Decade?”
