Albert Barry is a professor at University of Toronto, Scarborough, teaching in the Department of Global Development Studies. His work to date has focused mainly on agriculture, labour markets, and income distribution in developing countries, with special attention to Columbia. One major thread has been the effects of agrarian structure, and especially the size distribution of farms, on agricultural output and on the distribution of income generated by agriculture. The potential productivity advantages of small farms are demonstrated and interpreted in this work. More recently, he has been studying small-scale industry with a view to assessing the extent of parallelism between the two sectors in this regard. Work on labour markets, especially Columbia’s, has been mainly in the context of an attempt to assess the sources of income and welfare inequality in developing countries, and its relation to public policy. Studies of open urban unemployment in Columbia led him to question the centrality of this phenomenon in the interpretation of the economic setting of poorer families in the less developed countries. Intensive data work on income distribution trends in Columbia and the Philippines reflects concern that such causal analyses have little chance of paying off unless data problems are given high priority.

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