Nonetheless, despite all this good recent work on inequality at the Bank and the Fund, the growth in research and public debate on inequality elsewhere has been so large that the Bretton Woods institutions have become relatively smaller intellectual players in the field. In and of itself, this is clearly no bad thing. Inequality truly is one of the fundamental challenges facing today’s human societies, and the greater visibility and popularity of the topic is hugely welcome. Research institutes such as the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics, which hosts the World Inequality Database and publishes an annual _World Inequality Report_ , are producing important, pathbreaking work extending our knowledge of inequality around the world. Other examples include the team at UNU-WIDER, who host the World Income Inequality Database (WIID) and have a had a long tradition of work on both income and wealth inequality, as well as the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the City University of New York. Of course, most academic research on inequality is produced at universities around the world, whether they host one of these institutes or not.

From the perspective of the two institutions, however, two features of this particular surge in external research pose a challenge. First, the bulk of the inequality research currently conducted at the world’s leading research universities and institutes focuses on rich countries. This is not exceptional; the same is true of most other topics. Authors, journal editors and referees residing in the United States and Europe tend to be very interested in what is happening in their own countries. Second, a considerable share of the new work on inequality appears to focus on rich people. This too is perhaps unsurprising, given the rapid rise in top incomes – and top income shares – in most countries for which reliable data is available. It is also part of the key innovation that spurred much of this research which, as noted earlier, was the use of alternative data sources to supplement the inadequate information contained in most household surveys on the richest households.

There is plenty of evidence that the very rich are becoming richer, both in the Unites States and in many (but not all) other countries, both rich and poor. There is also evidence to suggest that as relatively small powerful groups come to control a disproportionate share of a country’s economic resources, fairness and competition suffer both in markets and, perhaps most insidiously, in the body politic. These mechanisms of growing concentration of power – market and political – may constitute real threats to the well-being of poor and middle-class people in many places. So, the focus on rich people and rich countries is understandable.

But attention spans are limited, and there is a real risk that that focus could detract from interest in poor people and poor countries and, most of all, in poor people in poor countries. These are the people who should matter the most to progressive multilateral institutions, and therein lies the challenge to the World Bank and the IMF. Those staff in the two institutions who would like to promote greater equity must embrace the great recent expansion in global attention to inequality, while at the same time working to keep the bright light of evidence shining on those most deprived and least able to protect themselves from challenges like climate change: the poor in poor countries.

# **3.  The future of inequality and multilateralism: New ideas needed**

Although intellectual fashions are hard to predict, the intense public and scholarly concern with inequality that marked Phase 5 above is unlikely to be a passing fad, at least in the short- to medium-run. Automation and digitalization have led to a process of occupational polarization in most advanced industrial 19