Dr. Diego Sanchez-Ancochea
Diego Sánchez-Ancochea was born in Spain but has been living away for more than twenty years first in the United States and for the last sixteen in England. As an undergraduate, professor Sánchez-Ancochea found in economics a useful tool to understand how the world is organized and how it can be productively changed. Realizing that economics should be the “science of poverty”, he decided to specialize in development and political economy. During the PhD at the New School for Social Research, he worked on Latin America, exploring the impact of globalization on economic growth and income distribution in small countries like Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic.
After moving to the UK in 2003, he started working with professor Juliana Martínez Franzoni (University of Costa Rica) on several projects about redistributive social policies. Their work shows the central role of universal social policies in the promotion of equity and suggests new ways to implement them across the developing world.
As an academic and policy adviser, promoting more equitable societies has been professor Sánchez-Ancochea´s main interest. He is convinced that inequality is ethically unacceptable, socially problematic and economically inefficient. He has just finished a book exploring what Latin America teaches about inequality to the rest of the world, as well as continuing his research on social policy. In October 2019, he also begun a three-year stint as head of the Oxford Department of International Development at the University of Oxford.
He would encourage young people interested in Latin America to focus on the interrelated challenges of income inequality, democratic deepening, climate change and sustainable development (from a social, political, economic and environmental perspective).
Recent Publications:
D. Sánchez-Ancochea (2019) The surprising reduction of inequality during a commodity boom: what do we learn from Latin America?, Journal of Economic Policy Reform
Martínez Franzoni, J., & Sánchez-Ancochea, D. (2016). Achieving universalism in developing countries. Background paper for UN's Human Development Report.
Relevant Information:
Interview at CNN Chile 26, Sept, 2019 (Only available in Spanish)
Interview at the Inter-American Development Bank's "La inequidad en America Latina en el largo plazo" (Only available in Spanish)