Knowledge Exchange and Impact

Why wealth inequality matters 

Over the past decade, wealth inequality – driven by the private ownership of assets such as property, savings and investments – has increasingly been recognised as a major divisive force in the UK, and across the globe. A new report on ‘Why wealth inequality matters’ was published by Mike Savage, Mina Mahmoudzadeh, Elizabeth Mann, Michael Vaughan and Sacha Hilhorst, with the aim of bringing this inequality into proper view. The report shows how wealth operates to amplify socio-economic inequalities associated with gender, race and class, and also serves to erode democratic engagement and political trust. This report was launched at an event on 13 May 2024, which aimed to equip policymakers, journalists and civil society groups with key insights that could be used for campaigning work in the run up to the General Election. The event received wide coverage, such as journalist Polly Toynbee’s The Guardian column and an article by Fairness Foundation.

Activism, Policy and Transformation Writing Retreat   

A two-day writing retreat was organised by the Activism, Policy and Transformation research project, which is part of the III’s Politics of Inequality Research Programme. Members, including Professor Armine Ishkanian and researchers from Chile, Armenia, South Africa and Lebanon, met face-to-face for the first time to map the outline of a co-authored article and to agree on other research dissemination and publication activities in the near future.    

This collaborative work was based on research conducted in 2022 by various members of the project. Participants included Mariam Khalatyan and Nvard Margaryan, from the Socioscope research non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Yerevan, Armenia, and Zeinab Srour, a journalist who works with the Arab Forum for Alternatives NGO in Beirut, Lebanon. LSE Global Academic Engagement’s global research fund, support from the LSE III, and the Eden Centre’s team were instrumental in facilitating this successful workshop.

Collaboration with the Runnymede Trust

On Saturday 1 July 2023, the III collaborated with the Runnymede Trust and the LSE Department of Sociology to host Building Bridges: connecting stories and championing racial justice,80 a dynamic and inspiring day of knowledge exchange and collective action. Representatives from grassroots organisations, academic institutions, and international NGOs hosted a variety of panel discussions and workshop-style sessions focused on three core themes: (1) The social and economic cost of racial injustice; (2) Hostile environments and migrants’ rights in the time of ‘stopping small boats’; (3) Reimaging policing and ‘criminal’ justice.   

Contributors included: Race & Health organisation, Young Foundation, Human Rights Watch, Debt Justice, Nanny Solidarity Network, Voice of Domestic Workers, Just Fair, University of Leeds, Liberty, Netpol, No More Exclusions, Mentivity, and more. The day was a resounding success, leaving us with budding collaborations, renewed vigour, and practical strategies to fight racial inequalities in the UK and beyond.   

Local Economic Development Policy 

Following the turbulent period in UK politics and economic policy in September and October 2022, the III’s Cities, Jobs and Economic Change Research Programme realised there was a greater opportunity to influence the debate on economic development policy. This started with the production of a briefing note on Investment Zones, which was a core part of Liz Truss’s growth agenda. III academics then presented their recommendations as an LSE public blog post81 which focused on providing evidence on what works, and how Investment Zones should be reformed. This led to significant interest from the Civil Service and in December 2022 a seminar was held with senior civil servants from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLHC) to discuss the Investment Zone agenda. Alongside this, a seminar series is being developed and will be hosted at the Department for Business and Trade; these will bring key LSE academics together with senior civil servants and other stakeholders to discuss areas of policy development. The team has also engaged with policymakers within the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, with a project member travelling to Manchester to meet about devolution policy in the UK.  

Comparing Spatial Inequalities over Time and across Advanced Economies 

This Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded project examines trends in geographic income inequality across five high-income countries – Canada, France, Germany, the UK and the US – since the 1970s. The project team has been developing a method for analysing geographic income inequality in a way that can be compared between countries, defining comparable geographic areas, having consistent measures of income and adjusting incomes for the varied local cost of living. The project’s second objective is to assess the importance of geographic inequalities in driving national income inequalities across our five study countries. Third, it analyses the common trends and differences between and within countries, and investigates the causes of these trends. The team will use this project as the foundation of a global database that provides information about inequalities between places. This will hopefully act as a point of information for researchers to study the causes of geographic income inequality, and for governments to understand how their country compares to others.

So far, the team members have presented the project and its findings to the DLHC, and the Regional and Urban Policy arm of the European Commission (DG Regio). The team will be conducting another meeting with DG Regio in September 2023.

Devolution and Regional Economic Development Policy 

The largest part of the policy impact work for the Cities, Jobs and Economic Change Research Programme has consisted of collaborating with Lisa Nandy MP and Shadow Secretary of State for the DLHC, and her team to assist in the development of the Labour Party’s response to levelling up and devolution in the UK. The team now works closely with one of Nandy’s top special advisors; this has allowed the team to tailor its work specifically to the questions Nandy and her team have. The programme researchers have written 10 short, focused and evidenced briefing notes on a range of topics. The key with these was the quick turn-around we were able to provide, but also maintaining a rigorous evidence base. One of these briefing notes was focused on the importance of including places in any economic development strategies the Labour Party develops. Nandy then used this briefing to ensure that Labour’s first mission – for the UK to be the highest growth country in the G7 – included reference to the distribution of this growth between places and people.

Alongside these short briefings, the programme’s researchers were asked to flesh out in more detail policy agendas for two areas of Nandy’s remit: regional economic growth and devolution. They based these on LSE research, the wider academic and public policy research base and discussions with over 30 experts. These papers were used to structure two workshops, which III researchers collaborated with the University College London’s Policy Lab to organise. The papers will be published in early September 2023 by Labour Together, which seeks to develop policies that are underpinned by consensus.