Center of the World Bank [...] from July 1974 to February 1976.” Not long after, and also at the Development Research Center, Sudhir Anand conducted his pioneering work on racial inequality in a developing country, using data from Malaysia’s 1970 Post-Enumeration Survey (Anand, 1983).<sup>16</sup> On the data front, Shahil Jain’s (1975) compilation of inequality measures for a number of countries was an important precursor to later efforts by the Bank to assemble and curate data on income distribution – a subject to which we will return.

As usual, these analytical developments at the World Bank did not take place in an intellectual vacuum. The early 1970s saw increased interest in issues of distribution in Economics, Philosophy, and in the Social Sciences more generally. John Rawls’s (1971) _A Theory of Justice_ was perhaps the most important philosophical challenge to utilitarianism in the Twentieth Century. Equality of opportunity was one of its key principles of justice, and it also proposed a very low tolerance for inequalities of any kind: they should only be tolerated insofar as they worked to the ultimate benefit of the worst-off. Within Economics, an early and illuminating attempt at linking long-run growth theory to the size distributions of income and wealth was provided by Stiglitz (1969). Atkinson (1970) placed the measurement of inequality on a sounder and more robust basis, which would provide the foundation for most of the work on measurement that followed, for decades.<sup>17</sup> Amartya Sen’s (1973) book _On Economic Inequality_ was both pathbreaking and influential, and his article in _Econometrica_ (Sen, 1976) first proposed that the measurement of poverty ought to explicitly incorporate an aversion to inequality. Some of the aforementioned work on inequality measurement and decomposition carried out at the World Bank during this time was influenced by – and in turn exerted its influence on – the work by Atkinson, Bourguignon, Kolm and Sen.

Inequality, both between groups of countries and within developing countries, was also being explored at this time by a group of influential Latin American and European economists and sociologists, including Raul Prebisch, Celso Furtado, Andre Gunder Frank, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, among others. While their so-called “dependency theory” of development is best known for its analysis of power asymmetries and unequal terms of exchange between industrial and poorer countries, it also incorporated an analysis of class dynamics and distributive conflict within countries as central to an understanding of underdevelopment. The theory’s influence in international debates was enhanced by its association with – perhaps even adoption by – the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC or CEPAL).

Back in the World Bank, the concern with poverty and human development, and the acknowledgment of the importance of distributional considerations in addressing them, was also reflected in the World Development Report 1980, the third-ever installment in the series of reports which would become the Bank’s most important flagship publication. The report’s theme was “Human Development and Poverty”, and it echoed many of themes first previewed in _Redistribution with Growth_ , including seeing investment in the human capital of poor people as both an end in itself and as a means to subsequently faster growth. The report also explicitly acknowledged the risk that policies aimed at investing in the poorest people might fall victim to vested interests. (Stern with Ferreira, 1997, p.574).

> 16 Anand’s work was also mostly carried out in the late 1970s, and some of it was published then, e.g. Anand (1977).

> 17 Kolm (1969) independently pursued many of the same themes that concerned Atkinson and Sen and was also influential.

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