- III. Although the swings of intellectual pendula are not always easy to predict, it seems probable that inequality will remain a major topic of public and academic interest for the foreseeable future, as various major global forces currently contribute to rising gaps both within and between countries. Against a background of much more abundant academic research and public debate on inequality in recent years, I argue that the Bretton Woods institutions can and should remain relevant in this area. Their niche, which is a hugely important one, is “inequality at the bottom”, in contrast to the growing emphasis elsewhere on inequality at the top. A continued focus on poor people, poor countries and, especially, poor people in poor countries, remains much needed and the World Bank and the IMF are well-placed to provide it.  Four specific areas are suggested for this research agenda.

Methodologically, the paper draws on three sources of information. The first is a simple text analysis of the online document and publication repositories maintained by the World Bank and the IMF. The World bank’s _Open Knowledge Repository_ is an electronic library containing all public-access documents produced by Bank staff since around the year 2000, as well as a selection of older documents. It currently contains over 33,000 documents organized in 11 collections. We downloaded and machine-read 16,573 such documents, between July and September 2021. For the IMF, I draw on 48,616 documents published between 1946 and 2021 and downloaded from the IMF eLibrary between July and September 2021. Using a word search algorithm, we searched the full text of all downloaded documents for a series of keywords, including equality; inequality; poverty; equity; and inequity. In this final version of the paper, I make use only of the “equality and inequality” series, to plot five-year moving averages of both the absolute and relative (to all words) usage of the terms.

This broad-brush quantitative analysis is important to ground truth my assessment of changes in the importance of inequality in the textual discourse of the two institutions over time. But it is complemented by a more detailed, albeit not exhaustive, survey of the literature on inequality produced within the Bank and the Fund since the late 1960s, as well as of the broader literature in economics that provides that disciplinary context. A key limitation that should be acknowledged is that I do not attempt to conduct similar surveys in other social and political sciences, such as anthropology and sociology, within which inequality was equally or more important than in economics over the period covered. Two justifications for this choice are, first, that the economics literature was, for better or worse, much more influential within these institutions (Kapur et al., 1997) and, second, that my own knowledge of these other literatures is much more limited.

Finally, a third source of information on which the paper draws – again, for better or worse – is personal experience: I was a member of staff at the World Bank between 1996 and 2020, working mostly – but not exclusively – in its research department. Most of my own research has always been about inequality. I have co-authored a few of the works mentioned in Section 2 and many others were written by people I know. While on the one hand this provides me with some “insider” insights which might contribute to the narrative, on the other there is a clear risk of participant bias. The paper can therefore not be a fully dispassionate account and is inevitably colored by my personal experience and perspective. It should be read in that light.

The paper is therefore a contribution to the sub-literature within development economics which has offered reflections on the intellectual role of the Bretton Woods institutions including, for example, 3