Institute of Development Studies

A wide diversity of economic indicators, national and international, have shown a surge in inequalities over the last two or three decades, linked to the pursuit of free-market ideologies, to globalisation and to conditionalities which made policies of the Washington consensus a requirement for obtaining international loans. This followed a period of falling income inequality over the 1950s and 1960s and much of the 1970s – years which with hindsight have often been described as ‘the golden age of development’. Nationally, policies of redistribution with growth, a mainstream concern during the 1970s, need to be rediscovered and brought into national policymaking, in both developing and developed countries.