Emelie Rohne Till, Lund University Department of Economic History
Watch the recording of the seminar on Youtube: https://youtu.be/rdNpaSY1uqA?feature=shared
The big question that all economic historians engage with at one level or another is “why are some countries rich and others still poor”? In search of this answer, the discipline has developed a lot of knowledge on, and methods for exploring, large-scale, long-term, societal-level change over time. Within the Human Rights Profile area, our research group at the Department of Economic History wishes to bring these research questions and methods to the field of human rights.
There is much fertile ground for research in the intersection of economic development, inequality and poverty, with issues of human rights – questions how to ensure that everyone can live in dignity, on food security, on how fruits of growth and transformation are distributed in a society, and on how to guarantee economic rights, etc. Specifically, we are interested in understanding the relationship between socio-economic inequality and human rights. Key questions that we are interested in are whether there are any trade-offs between equality and respect for human rights in certain cases and certain phases; and if so, what these trade-offs and links look like; and also, what can be learnt from this going forward.
The project is currently at an early stage. Through receiving a Seed money-grant from the Human Rights Profile Area (LU) in the fall of 2023, we have made some initial progress. With the seed money, we were able to hire two Master’s Students from the Department of Economic History to produce reviews on the existing knowledge in the intersection of the fields of socio-economic inequality and human rights: Lisa Lehane and Louis Louw. During the spring of 2024, Lisa and Louis produced two excellent reviews on the subject, one literature review of the field, and one review of existing databases on quantitative elements of human rights.
The literature review sets out to map the existing literature in the intersection of human rights and socio-economic inequality. The literature that applies an interdisciplinary approach is rather small, and generally human rights have been a peripheral concern in economic analysis. Some of the key concerns that are highlighted in the review are that part of the difficulty lies in that indicators of socio-economic inequality and human rights are imperfectly conceptualized; and that economists/economic historians and human rights scholars emphasize different aspects of socio-economic inequality.
The quantitative review maps ten existing databases on human rights and socio-economic inequality. Two of these are selected for more in-depth review of their methodologies: analysis into their respective methodologies: the Human Rights Measurement Initiative and the UNU WIDER World Income Inequality database. Some key points to emerge from the quantitative review are that human rights are measured in different ways depending on the rights being analyzed, that only five countries have ratified all 18 human rights treaties, and that individuals living in low socio-economic conditions often are found to be at greater risk of human rights violations. It also specifies many of the challenges of measuring and assessing human rights.
Together, the preparatory studies show that there is ample scope for more research that builds on and clarifies the existing knowledge on the relationship between human rights and inequality. The aim going forward will be to use these two high-quality reviews as a foundation for a grant application. Our hope is that this will lead to the building up of a large database of quantitative indicators for both inequality and human rights, that can contribute to our understanding of this relationship.
Emelie Rohne Till is a researcher at Lund University. Her main research areas concern development economics, approached from an economic history perspective. Within this she focuses on the role of structural transformations and of the agricultural sector in economic development, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa.
