Sumner's contemporary research focuses on: •
global poverty and
inequality; •
inclusive growth and
structural change in
Southeast Asia (
Indonesia,
Malaysia and
Thailand); • the relationship between
poverty,
inequality and
economic development. A central theme of his work is the persistence of poverty in
middle-income countries and the implications of national inequality for poverty and
theories of poverty. His research seeks to reconnect the analysis of poverty and inequality with the study of economic development and
structural transformation. Sumner’s research has had an impact on the understandings of, and approaches to global poverty and inequality in terms of their understandings of where much of the world's poverty is located, theories of the cause of poverty, and the growing importance of national inequality in understanding absolute poverty. His is particularly known for his research that focused on the fact that about a billion people or three-quarters of the poor live in middle-income countries which he termed the “
new bottom billion”. This finding raised questions about the distributional patterns of
economic growth, the divorce of much
foreign aid from world poverty and about the dominant
country analytical categories. It has contributed to a changed understanding of global poverty. His work argues that absolute poverty is a
distributional outcome of specific patterns of economic development and
welfare regimes. Together with Alex Cobham he proposed a new
measure of inequality linked more closely to poverty, the
Palma ratio based on the work of
Gabriel Palma. This new measure of inequality is now reported annually as a standard measure in the
statistical databases of the
OECD, the
UNDP and the UK
Office of National Statistics. His work has been discussed in media outlets such as
The Economist,
The Guardian, the
Voice of America,
BBC News and
The Washington Post. ==Publications==