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The six decades after the end of World War II, until the crisis of 2008, were a golden age in terms of the narrow measure of economic development, real per capita income (or gross domestic product, GDP). This multiplied by a factor of four for the world as a whole between 1950 and 2008. For comparison, before this period it took a thousand years for world per capita GDP to multiply by a factor of fifteen. Between the year 1000 and 1978, China’s income per capita GDP increased by a factor of two; but it multiplied six-fold in the next thirty years. India’s per capita income increased five-fold since independence in 1947, having increased a mere twenty percent in the previous millennium. Of course, the crisis of 2008 caused a major dent in the long-term trend, but it was just that. Even allowing for the sharp decreases in output as the result of the crisis, postwar economic growth is spectacular compared to what was achieved in the previous thousand years. But what about the distribut...

The present of the economic development discourse is, of course, shaped by the trends of the distant and recent past. An interesting and important feature of the current landscape is the shift in the global geography of poverty. Using standard official definitions, forty years ago ninety percent of the world’s poor lived in low-income countries. Today, three quarters of the world’s poor live in middle-income countries (Kanbur and Sumner, 2012). The fast growth of some large countries, accompanied by rising inequality in these countries, means that the average income increases have not been reflected in poverty reduction to the same extent. So, although these countries have now crossed the middle-income category boundary, which depends on average income, they still have large absolute numbers of poor people. These poor in middle-income countries vie with the poor in poor countries for global concern and attention. This disconnect between a person being poor and their country being po...

The past and present of economic development sets the platform for the long-term future. Environmental degradation and climate change will surely worsen development prospects and ratchet up conflict and environmental stress-related migration. The issues here have been well debated in the literature (see for example, Kanbur and Shue, 2018). And the actions needed are relatively clear—the question is rather whether there is the political will to carry them out. Beyond challenges that arise due to ecological change and environmental degradation, another prominent challenge that has arisen since the 1980s is the global decline in the labor share. The labor share refers to payment to workers as a share of gross national product at the national level, or as a share of total revenue at the firm level. Its downward trend globally is evident using observations from macroeconomic data (Karababounis and Neiman, 2013; Grossman et al., 2017) as well as from firm-level data (Autor et al., 2017)....

Looking back over the past seven decades since the end of World War II, economic development presents us with a string of contradictions. There have been unprecedented rises in per capita income, with many large developing countries crossing the threshold from low-income to middle-income status. These income increases have been accompanied by equally unprecedented improvements in income poverty and in education and health indicators. But at the same time there is palpable anxiety about the development process, its sustainability, and its implications for the global economy. Despite the fast increases in income in poorer countries, gaps between them and rich countries remain large. Together with conflict and environmental stress, this has led to migration pressures, particularly for richer countries but also for better-off developing countries. The combination of migration pressures and rising inequality has led to the toxic rise of illiberal populist politics which is threatening po...