to be produced on both sides of 19<sup>th</sup> Street, including Lakner and Milanovic’s (2016) paper on changes in global inequality “from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession”, which gave birth to the now iconic “Elephant Curve” and was published in the _World Bank Economic Review_ . A volume entitled _Fair Progress? Economic mobility across generations around the world_ (Narayan, van der Weide et al., 2018) also deserves mention: it presented results from a large effort to collect and process for comparability data on intergenerational educational mobility around the world, in a scale never previously attempted.

IMF research on inequality continued to grow during this period, as Figure 2 above suggests. A revised version of the original paper on “Redistribution, inequality and growth”, first circulated as an IMF document (by Ostry, Berg and Tsangarides) in 2014, was published as Berg et al. (2018). In the following year, Ostry and Berg, along with Prakash Loungani, published _Confronting Inequality: How Societies Can Choose Inclusive Growth_ (Ostry et al, 2019), a book aimed at disseminating the Fund’s message that inequality is bad for growth to a wider audience. Senior management support for work on inequality, as well as gender issues and other topics relatively new to the IMF, continued under Kristalina Georgieva, who left the number two job at the World Bank to replace Christine Lagarde as Managing Director in 2019.

Second, both institutions have continued to make a contribution to the monitoring of inequality changes around the world. At the World Bank, this took place in the context of a bi-annual flagship publication known as the _Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report_ (PSPR), which was intended to monitor the world’s progress toward the institution’s self-assigned “twin goals” of eliminating poverty and promoting shared prosperity. There have now been three such reports (World Bank, 2016, 2018 and 2020), all jointly produced by some combination of the Research and Data Departments, in partnership with the Bank’s central operational hub for poverty work, which during this time has been known as the Poverty and Equity Global Practice. Although these reports focus explicitly on poverty and “shared prosperity”, they inevitably discuss inequality as well since, as noted above, it is very hard to discuss changes in either without a broader understanding of changes in the distribution. Indeed, the first PSPR (2016) was entitled “Taking on Inequality” and made the point that growth alone – even if it continued at the relatively high rates of the previous two decades - would be insufficient for the world to reach the 3% target for extreme poverty by 2030. Doing so would require a reduction in inequality as well.<sup>32</sup> Third, a lot of the work summarized immediately above builds on one of the Bank’s key comparative advantages, namely its unique ability to assemble, curate and analyze microdata from a very large number of countries in the world. These data underpin the work on global inequality; on international comparisons of economic mobility; and the monitoring exercises reported in the Poverty and Shared Prosperity reports. Summary statistics from the data sets and, increasingly, the ability to access the microdata directly to produce simple calculations on the fly, are made available through a website known as Poverty and Inequality Platform, which has succeeded the online platform PovcalNet. These websites have been important public goods provided to the academic and policy communities around the world by the Bank’s Research (and now Data) Departments. PovcalNet owes its origins to the early work on global poverty measurement started by Martin Ravallion and colleagues such as Shaohua Chen and Prem Sangraula. Today, it is a large-scale operation that requires seamless collaboration between the Research and Data groups and the Bank’s operational poverty economists working on each individual country.<sup>33</sup>

> 32 Once again, there are echoes of “Redistribution with Growth”. 33 Dean Jolliffe, Christoph Lakner and Daniel Mahler now play important roles.

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