In contrast to neo-classical mainstream approaches to economics, this innovative Modern Guide addresses the complex reality of economic development as an inherently uneven process, exploring the ways of theorizing and empirically exploring the mechanisms with which the unevenness manifests itself. Advancing experience-based theories in the debate of economic development, this Modern Guide provides a qualitative, holistic and nuanced understanding of economic inequality by uniquely combining explanations from a large number of academic fields. It covers a wide array of issues influencing wealth and poverty, technological innovation, ecology and sustainability, financialization, population, gender and geography, and considers the dynamics of cumulative causations created by the interplay between these factors. By looking at falling real wages, world income distribution, and refugees and migrants in poorer regions, it ultimately explains why wealth and poverty are so unevenly distributed globally. The cutting-edge discussions in this Modern Guide will prove invaluable for students and scholars from a range of disciplines including economics and development studies. In today's world of 'single-issue management', the alternative theories of mutual influence in this book will prove useful to policy makers working across a variety of economic fields.