Igor Baccin Martins

Igor Martins

Senior lecturer

Personal profile

Research

I am an economic historian who obtained my PhD in 2020 at Lund University. During my PhD, I was a Visiting Researcher at Stellenbosch University. Since completing my PhD, I have worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Lund University and the University of Cambridge. I also serve as a consultant to STINT (The Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education).

My research focuses on African economic history, particularly in Southern and West Africa, slavery, labor economics, and colonial legacies. I am also interested in development economics, institutions, and poverty dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Complementary to my research, I teach courses on academic writing, research methods, emerging economies, and colonialism in Africa and Latin America. I was awarded the Teacher of the Year prize in 2020 by Lund University School of Economics and Management.

I contribute to "The Establishment, Growth, and Legacy of a Settler Colony: Quantitative Panel Studies of the Political Economy of the Cape Colony," the largest African Economic History research project globally. This project uses big data and machine learning to analyze the Cape Colony’s development, its institutions, and their impact on growth, inequality, and welfare.

I also work on "Where Have All the Workers Gone? Labour and Work in Ghana, 1951-2010". This project explores the rise of informal and precarious labor versus the underestimated incidence of wage labor, especially in rural areas, challenging older assumptions about labor patterns in postcolonial Africa.

Additionally, I contribute to "Resilience to Economic Shrinking: A Social Capability Approach to Processes of Catching Up in the Developing World since the 1950s." Our goal is to understand how the least developed countries can build resilience to economic shrinking and sustain development. We aim to fill knowledge gaps by establishing empirical growth/shrinking patterns among developing countries over the last seven decades, assessing the role of economic shrinking, and analyzing these experiences through a framework of social capabilities.

I also have a keen interest in bibliometrics. I am involved in "Shifting Patterns in International Research Cooperation," which studies the interplay between international scientific cooperation and geopolitics. This work aims to help governments, universities, scientists, and firms balance the benefits of academic cooperation with potential threats to sovereignty, security, and democracy.

Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):

  • SDG 1 - No Poverty
  • SDG 5 - Gender Equality
  • SDG 8 - Decent Work and Economic Growth
  • SDG 10 - Reduced Inequalities
  • SDG 17 - Partnerships for the Goals

UKÄ subject classification

  • Economic History

Free keywords

  • Inequality
  • Poverty
  • Slavery
  • Labor economics
  • Colonialism

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Collaborations the last five years

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