Dr Matt Barlow 

ESRC Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of International Development, King’s College London.

Mentor: Dr Ingrid Kvangraven and Dr Ewa Karwoski

Project title: Taxing for Development: Contested Ideas, the State and Commodity Taxes

Matt is an ESRC Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of International Development at King’s College London. He completed his PhD in Politics at the University of York in September 2021. His research interests are in the areas of political economy of development, ideas of development, politics of taxation, political economy of gender and regionalism. In his PhD he explored the ideological challenges of raising export taxes in Argentina in the early-2000s. His research explores how ideas of tax become embedded with other ideas of development creating barriers to mobilising domestic resources and to making progress towards the SDGs. His research seeks to build a conceptual framework around tax ideas that can be applied to other Emerging Economies and in other regions. Prior to this fellowship, Matt has held part-time research positions in the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre (IGDC) University of York on the GCRF-RCUK funded project: Thanzi la Onse (Health for all), the GCRF projects: Gender and Health Systems after Covid-19: The Role of Policy, The Natural Resources Economy in South America: Extraction, Sustainability and Citizenship and NGO Data for more inclusive development. In 2019, Matt spent a period as a Visiting Researcher at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, he will return to this University in February 2023 as part of his fellowship.