A new cross-country analysis from the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) reports that income inequality between the global North and the global South has widened dramatically since 1960. Published in New Political Economy, the study by Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan directly challenges the widely repeated claim that poorer countries are steadily “catching up” through capitalist growth.
The paper, “The myth of catch-up development: trends in core–periphery inequality from 1960 to 2023,” examines complete annual data for 173 countries accounting for 99.9% of the world population. By tracking long-run income trajectories rather than short windows of rapid growth, the authors isolate the role of the global economic structure in shaping outcomes for different regions.
Their results show a striking pattern of divergence: the core captures between four and ten times more income growth than the periphery depending on the currency conversion approach used. In other words, global development has not operated as a convergence machine; it has behaved more like a redistribution system tilted toward advanced economies.
On relative measures, the periphery’s income relative to the core improves only marginally. Since 1960, the ratio rises by no more than three percentage points, and the limited progress is attributed entirely to China. Elsewhere, relative standing deteriorates, indicating that “catch-up” is not a broadly shared pathway.
The study also finds that the core is increasingly exclusive in population terms. Although a small number of peripheral states have been reclassified as advanced for geopolitical reasons, the majority of the world remains outside the core. The share of people living in the periphery increases from 80% in 1960 to 86% in 2023.
A key technical contribution is the authors’ separation of general development dynamics from exceptional political integration. They document cases of reclassification that cluster in Southern Europe, East Asia, and along the eastern EU border, forming a geopolitical buffer rather than a replication-ready route to prosperity.
The paper highlights the neoliberal era as a period of intensifying inequality. During the 1980s and 1990s, IMF and World Bank–associated reforms coincided with sharp, long contractions in several peripheral regions, including Latin America, Middle East and North Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
By contrast, core recessions during the same broad period were shallower and recovered faster. The authors frame this asymmetry as evidence that recession experiences are structured by position in the world economy—not merely by domestic policy choices.
To spur genuine development, the authors argue for “delinking” from the imperial core, expanding sovereign industrial capacity, strengthening South–South trade, and reducing dependence on core currencies. Their central conclusion is blunt: catch-up will not emerge within existing rules of the capitalist system.
Article Title: The myth of catch-up development: trends in core–periphery inequality from 1960 to 2023.
News Publication Date: 15-Jul-2026
Web References: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2026.2659076
References: New Political Economy. (2026). “The myth of catch-up development: trends in core–periphery inequality from 1960 to 2023.”
Image Credits: Not provided.
Keywords: core–periphery inequality, catch-up development, neoliberalism, IMF, World Bank, structural adjustment, global South, capitalist world economy
