Dr Andy Sumner

Andy Sumner is a Reader in International Development in the Department of International Development, King’s College, London.

He has published extensively on poverty, inequality and economic development including nine books.His research is at the interface of development studies and development economics.

His current research focuses on: (i) global poverty and inequality; (ii) Inclusive growth and structural transformation in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand); and (iii) the future of aid and development cooperation in middle-income developing countries.

Andy Sumner is a Reader in International Development in the Department of International Development, King’s College, London. His research is at the interface of development studies and development economics.

His current research focuses on: (i) global poverty and inequality; Inclusive growth and structural transformation in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand); (ii) the future of foreign aid and (iii) the future of 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 world’s poor live in middle-income countries. This raises various questions about the causes of poverty, about distributional patterns of economic development and about the dominant country analytical categories themselves.

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.