Research project leads international consortium on wealth reproduction policies
The Center for Law and Political Economy (Nudep) of the São Paulo Law School (FGV Sao Paulo Law School), in collaboration with foreign universities, has initiated an ambitious research project to investigate public policies that facilitate or hinder the reproduction of wealth in different countries. Wealth reproduction policies are understood as those that can reinforce (or change) the concentration of income, for example, tax policies that impose taxation on high incomes.
Started in January 2024, the research is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and is expected to run for the next four years. Entitled Politics of Wealth Reproduction (PoWR), the project arises from the observation of a consistent inequality bias in the production of public policies in different Western countries. This bias privileges the interests of the richest citizens to the detriment of the poorest, accentuating the concentration of income and economic inequality. In Brazil, for example, the income of the richest stratum grew two to three times more than the average recorded by 95% of Brazilians between 2017 and 2022 (Gorbetti, 2024). The country's situation is not an isolated case and follows a global trend that has been observed since the 1980s (Atkinson, 2015; Tanndal; Waldenström, 2018). In view of this scenario, we seek to understand in a comparative way how this favoring of the wealthiest citizens manifests itself in public policies and for what reasons.
The specific objective of the research is to identify how this bias presents itself from the trajectory of policymakers, investigating attributes such as origin, access to education, goods and financial assets, as well as the circulation and interaction between elites in each country. To this end, the project will employ mixed methods for a comparative analysis that covers countries in the Global North and South. Initially, data from 50 democracies will be collected and analyzed to examine, for example, the characteristics of the ministers of economy and finance and the most relevant public policies for the reproduction of wealth adopted by them between 2005 and 2020. In a second moment, in-depth case studies will be conducted in four countries (Brazil, United Kingdom, Germany and South Africa), covering the same period. Among the data to be collected in the two phases of the research are socioeconomic characteristics of public policy makers, the institutional constructions of public policies and the implications of these policies for the richest layers of the population. This integrated, data-triangulated approach seeks to offer a comprehensive explanation of the mechanisms underlying the reproduction of economic inequality.
The project is carried out by a research consortium formed by FGV Sao Paulo Law School, Philipps-University Marburg (Germany), Strathclyde University (Scotland) and University of Cape Town (South Africa). The research team is interdisciplinary, with researchers in the fields of Political Science, Law and Economics. The project has five principal investigators: FGV Sao Paulo Law School professor Raquel Pimenta, Despina Alexiadou (Strathclyde University), Vimal Ranchhod (University of Cape Town) and Miquel Pellicer and Eva Wegner (Philipps-University Marburg). Iana Alves de Lima, a PhD student in public administration and government at FGV EAESP, and Paula Pagliari de Braud, a master's student in sociology at the University of São Paulo, are part of the Brazilian team. The group will hold its first face-to-face meeting in a workshop at FGV Sao Paulo Law School between June 17 and 19 of this year.
