Rosemary Thorp

Rosemary Thorp was formerly Reader in the Economics of Latin America and Head of Department in 2003-04.

Her Progress, Poverty and Exclusion: an Economic History of Latin America in the Twentieth Century , written at the invitation of the Inter-American Development Bank, is a much-used textbook. Three companion volumes (Macmillan 2000) are entitled: Vol 1: The Export Age: the Latin American Economies in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries (co-editor with Enrique Cárdenas and José Antonio Ocampo), Vol 2: Latin America in the 1930s: The Role of the Periphery in World Crisis (2nd edition) (editor), Vol. 3 Industrialization and the State in Latin America: The Postwar Years (co-editor with Enrique Cárdenas and José Antonio Ocampo).

As well as contributing two chapters for the Cambridge History of Latin America on the Latin American Economies (1913-1919 and in the 1940s), she has written an economic history of Peru, on social policy in Peru and Venezuela, and on decentralisation in Chile and Colombia (OUP 2001) with Alan Angell and Pamela Lowden.

Between 2004 and 2010 she participated in a DFID-funded research centre at ODID on Inequality and Human Security and Ethnicity (CRISE), specialising in research on Bolivia, Peru and Guatemala in collaboration with partners in Latin America and Corinne Caumartin, Research Officer at ODID.

In December 2001 she became for five years the Chair of Trustees of Oxfam GB. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Catholic University of Peru in 2008, a CBE in the New Year’s Honours List 2009, and an Honorary Professorship at the Universidad del Pacifico, Lima in 2010.

While formally retired (2008), she is still active in research. Her current research interests are in the political economy of extractives and development, and inequality. Her most recent book was published in English in 2010 and will in Spanish in 2011.