Institution: UNU-WIDER

Gary S. Fields is the John P. Windmuller Professor of International and Comparative Labor and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. He is also a Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow at UNU-WIDER. 

He has been an Ivy League teacher and professor for more than forty years. He teaches and conducts research in labour economics, development economics, and public policy in the university-wide department of economics, the ILR School, and the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs.

Fields has published more than 150 books and articles. His books include topics such as poverty, inequality, and development: Retirement, Pensions, and Social Security (with Olivia Mitchell), Distribution and Development: A New Look at the Developing World; Pathways out of Poverty (with Guy Pfeffermann), Bottom-Line Management, and Working Hard, Working Poor. In 2014 Fields received the IZA Prize in labour economics, the top award in the field

Andy Sumner is Professor of International Development at King’s College London and President of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI). He is also a Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow at UNU-WIDER.

He has twenty years’ international research experience using both qualitative and quantitative methods and has published 15 books and more than 70 papers, journal articles, and book chapters. His research sits in interdisciplinary Development Studies and focuses on questions related to economic development and inequality dynamics across developing countries, and in Southeast Asia in particular.

He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and the Royal Society of Arts; a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Economics and Development Studies at Padjadjaran University, Indonesia; Research Associate, University of Oxford; and Senior Non-Resident Research Fellow at the United Nations University, WIDER, Helsinki as well as the Center for Global Development, Washington DC. He is also a former Vice President of EADI and a former council member of the Development Studies Association (DSA). Andy is an editor of the joint United Nations University and Cambridge University Press book series and co-editor of Palgrave MacMillan’s ‘Rethinking International Development’ book series. He also serves on the editorial boards of the European Journal of Development Research, Nature Sustainability, and Global Policy.

Kunal Sen has over three decades of experience in academic and applied development economics research. He is the author of eight books and the editor of five volumes on the economics and political economy of development. Since 2019 he has served as Director of UNU-WIDER while on leave from the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, where he is a professor of development economics.

Professor Sen is a leading international expert on the political economy of growth and development. He has performed extensive research on international finance, the political economy determinants of inclusive growth, the dynamics of poverty, social exclusion, female labour force participation, and the informal sector in developing economies. His research has focused on India, East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Professor Sen’s books include The Political Economy of India’s Growth Episodes (2016), The Process of Financial Liberalization in India (1997), and the Economic Restructuring in East Asia and India: Perspectives on Policy Reform (1995). His is a co-editor of Deals and Development: The Political Dynamics of Growth Episodes (2018) and The Politics of Inclusive Development (2016). And has also written twenty-five chapters in other volumes and published more than ninety peer-reviewed journal articles on topics in his field.

Brookings Institution

John Page is a Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow at UNU-WIDER and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.

He is the Country Director for Tanzania in the International Growth Centre, London, and adjunct professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo, Japan. He is also a research associate of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University and the Oxford Centre for the Study of Resource Rich Economies. He has previously served as a consultant to the African Development Bank, the Global Development Network, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the United Nations Industrial Development Program (UNIDO), USAID and the World Bank.

Dr. Page worked at the World Bank from 1980-2008, where his senior positions included: Director, Poverty Reduction; Director, Economic Policy; Chief Economist and Director, Economic and Social Development, Middle East and North Africa and Chief Economist, Africa. Prior to his appointment at the World Bank, he was a member of the faculty at Princeton University. He has held visiting professorships at Princeton, the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University and at Georgetown University.