Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven

Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven is a Norwegian political economist whose work sits at the intersection of development, inequality, and global finance.

Currently, she is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in International Development at King’s College London. Here, she confronts the deep structures of inequality shaping the global economy. She also challenges economics to face its own blind spots.

Kvangraven’s research moves across three core areas. 1) Uneven development 2) International financial subordination 3) A sharp critique of economics as a discipline.

Crucially, her work rethinks dependency theory. She reframes it as a modern research programme. In doing so, she recentres questions of power, inequality, and historical asymmetry. As a result, development economics is pushed back toward its structural roots. More broadly, Kvangraven’s research shows how capitalism’s polarising tendencies continue to shape global production and finance — especially from the perspective of the Global South.

At the same time, Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven has helped define a new agenda on international financial subordination. Through interdisciplinary work, she shows how global finance exercises structural power. Most importantly, this power is often most forceful in the Global South. Her empirical research, including on African economies, reveals how financial systems both reflect and reproduce global hierarchies.

Equally important, Kvangraven is a leading critic of the economics discipline itself. She exposes its enduring Eurocentrism. She questions the dominance of GDP as a measure of progress. And she challenges the widespread reliance on methods such as randomised controlled trials. Taken together, her work calls for an economics that is more historical, political, and globally grounded.

In addition, Kvangraven is co-author of Decolonising Economics, a landmark intervention. The book dismantles the myth of neutrality in economics. It also calls for a discipline capable of confronting structural racism, climate breakdown, and global inequality. As such, it has been widely recognised as both timely and courageous.

Beyond her research, Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven is a builder of intellectual platforms. She is the founding editor of Developing Economics. She also serves as a founding steering group member of Diversifying and Decolonising Economics (D-Econ). In parallel, she sits on the management committee of the Association for Heterodox Economics and the advisory board of IDEAs Africa.

Kvangraven co-hosts the Hierarchies of Development podcast, bringing critical economic debates to a wider global audience.