Current Research: Pedro Ramos Pinto

The Inequality, Social Science & History Research network, an initiative co-hosted by the Department of History and the Centre for History & Economics in Cambridge has been running a 2-year long series of events looking to bring an historical perspective to current debates on inequality.

Pedro Ramos Pinto, who directs the network, was invited to write a chapter for an annual publication aimed at development practitioners and policy-makers across the world. Drawing on the work of the research network, Pedro sought to ague how history can help understand several aspects of contemporary inequality: the tremendous variety in ways of being unequal that hide behind aggregations and inter-country comparisons such as the GINI index, and how the layers of the past condition local social structures, interacting with global forces (such as capital) to produce specific modes of inequality.

This chapter has just been published in Reducing Inequalities: A Sustainable Development Challenge, part of the Planet for Life Series/Sustainable Development in Action, which is a joint venture between The Energy and Resources Institute in India, the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), and the Institut du développement durable et des relations internationales (Iddri) at Sciences Po, Paris.

The book was launched at Delhi Sustainable Development Summit in Delhi on 1st February 2013, and includes 13 chapters, with contributors such as Thomas Piketty, Sridhar Venkatapuram and François Bourguignon. It can be purchased from the TERI Press bookstore, while French and Chinese translations will be available later in the year.

Editors Note: This is an archived blog post from 8/2/2013.