Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven is Lecturer in International Development in the Department of International Development at King’s College, London. Her work is interdisciplinary, cutting across development economics, international political economy, economic history and development studies. Her research is broadly centered on the role of finance in development, structural explanations for global inequalities, the political economy of development, and critically assessing the economics field itself, in particular from an anti-colonial perspective.  

She has approached structural features of inequalities from both theoretical and empirical angles. For example, she has made the case for a redefinition of ‘dependency theory’ as a research program to offer guidance for a renewal of development economics by bringing in broader structural questions of how inequality is produced and reproduced in the global economy and is currently developing a research program on international financial subordination with an interdisciplinary group of co-authors. Empirically, she is exploring the subordinate financial position in which African countries find themselves, and what this means for domestic financial markets and broader structural change. Her research on how political actors and institutions shape economic development debates spans a broad range of issues, including the debates about financial inclusion, electronic payment systems, market-based finance, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Finally, her research on critically scrutinizing the Economics field itself ranges from exploring the impact of the use of GDP as the main measure of growth, critically evaluating the use of randomized control trials (RCTs) in Economics, to unpacking and evaluating what decolonisation entails for the Economics field, including for its understanding of post-colonial economies and racial inequalities. Her work has been published in leading international journals such as Development and Change, New Political Economy, Review of Political Economy, Review of Development Economics, Review of African Political Economy and Review of International Political Economy. She has a book forthcoming on Decolonizing Economics with Polity Press. 

She is also the founder and editor of the blog Developing Economics, co-founder and Steering Group Member of Diversifying and Decolonising Economics (D-Econ), Coordinator of the Association for Heterodox Economics (AHE), among other things. She obtained her PhD in Economics from The New School in 2018.