Knowledge Exchange and Impact

Launch of the Global Estimates of Opportunity and Mobility Database

The Global Estimates of Opportunity and Mobility (GEOM) database was officially launched during the ‘Equality of opportunity and intergenerational mobility: a global perspective’ conference that took place in Bari, Italy on the 6 and 7 June 2024. This database offers the most comprehensive set of estimates on Inequality of Opportunity available worldwide. To date, GEOM contains estimates for 72 countries, accounting for 67% of the world’s population and covering a time span as wide as 40 years in some cases. The database is now online and has attracted the interest of media and scholars around the globe, including mentions in a recent Fairness Foundation report in the UK, and in Il Sole 24 Ore, a leading Italian newspaper.

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 Fairness Foundation.

Latin America and Caribbean Inequality Review papers published

During the past year, 27 working papers that constitute the phase 1 of the Latin America and Caribbean Inequality Review (LACIR) were published. In February 2024, Francisco Ferreira presented summary results of the Review to the Annual Meetings of the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB). In April 2024, LACIR panellists gathered at a synthesis symposium that took place in Mexico City to summarise the key findings from the report. A public event was also held in Chile entitled ‘What do we know about inequality in Chile and Latin America? Evidence and public policies’.

Beyond disseminating findings through the publication of these papers, this year the LACIR team launched a podcast together with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB entitled ‘Voices in action: rethinking equality’ to reach a wider audience from the region.

Launch of SOUTHMOD models

As part of the III’s collaboration with the ‘SOUTHMOD - simulating tax and benefit policies for development’ project, two training courses on the use of tax-benefit microsimulation for policy analysis were successfully delivered to government officials in Peru and Costa Rica.8 From the 20 to 23 November 2023, Dr Xavier Jara in collaboration with Universidad del Pacífico organised the first training and launch event on PERUMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model for Peru. From the 6 to 8 May 2024, Dr Xavier Jara in collaboration with Universidad de Costa Rica organised the first training and launch event on CRIMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model for Costa Rica. The workshops included participants from government ministries, central banks and tax authorities of each country.

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Non-dom status abolished

As part of the 2024 Spring Budget, the former Chancellor announced that the non-domiciled (non-dom) tax regime will be phased out. From April 2025, people who move to the UK will not have to pay tax on money they earn overseas for the first four years. After that period, if they continue to live in the UK, they will pay the same tax as everyone else. This news followed influential research by Dr Arun Advani, Dr Andy Summers and David Burgherr showing that abolishing the regime could raise £3.2 billion a year for the UK economy. In 2023 the Labour Party pledged to abolish non-dom status, and the Conservative government was initially sceptical, but the compelling weight of evidence soon forced a change of view.

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Collaboration with Joseph Rowntree Foundation

The past year saw a new collaboration between the III and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), specifically focusing on the role of framing in the politics of wealth inequality. A public-facing report was published summarising academic knowledge about framing of wealth inequality, as well as a set of provocations for future knowledge exchange between practitioners and researchers. JRF published this report on its website as ‘Changing the narrative on wealth inequality’. This was followed by a set of four workshops in the first half of 2024. Participants primarily included representatives from social change organisations such as Fairness Foundation, Women’s Budget Group, the Equality Trust, Tax Justice UK and Patriotic Millionaires, as well as academics from seven different institutions outside LSE.

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.

Building Bridges Event 

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.

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