Global North‑South Income Gap Widens, Study Finds

Researchers Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan of the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona published a study in the journal New Political Economy that examines income inequality between the world’s core (advanced) economies and peripheral (emerging and developing) economies from 1960 to 2023. Using annual data for 173 countries—representing 99.9 % of the global population—the authors find that the absolute income gap has expanded by 170 % to 270 % over the period, with core economies growing four to ten times faster than peripheral ones. Relative gains for the periphery are modest and driven almost entirely by China; excluding China, the rest of the peripheral economies fall further behind. The study argues that the conventional narrative of a “great convergence” driven by capitalism and market liberalisation is fundamentally flawed. It also highlights that the 1980s‑1990s era of market liberalisation and IMF‑World Bank structural adjustment programmes intensified the divide, causing severe, prolonged recessions in four of seven peripheral regions, notably a 23 % income drop in sub‑Saharan Africa that took 36 years to recover.