Prof. Andrew Sumner (King's College London) UK

Andy Sumner is a Professor in International Development and Co-Director of King’s International Development Institute, King’s College London. His research focuses on poverty theory and concepts and the causes of poverty both at a global level and with reference to Southeast Asia and Indonesia in particular. His work challenges the orthodox view that absolute poverty is necessarily minimal or ‘residual’ at higher levels of average per capita income; rather, poverty is the outcome of specific patterns of economic development and distribution. 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. This raises various questions about the causes of poverty, about distributional patterns of economic development and about the dominant country analytical categories themselves. He holds associate positions at Oxford University at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC. He was UK representative and Vice President of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes between 2008 to 2014 and a council member of the Development Studies Association from 2000 to 2014. He has been listed in Foreign Policy Magazine’s ‘Top 100 Global Thinkers’ and is Deputy Editor and an Editorial Board Member of Global Policy Journal.