Branko Milanovic is a Visiting Presidential Professor at the Graduate Center City University of New York and Senior Scholar at the Stone Center for Socio-economic Inequality. He obtained his Ph. D. in economics (1987) from the University of Belgrade with a dissertation on income inequality in Yugoslavia. He served as lead economist in the World Bank’s Research Department for almost 20 years, leaving to write his seminal book on global income inequality, Worlds Apart (2005). He was senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington (2003-2005) and has held teaching appointments at the University of Maryland (2007-2013) and at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University (1997- 2007).
Branko’s main area of work is income inequality, in individual countries and globally, including in pre-industrial societies. In addition to numerous papers for the World Bank, he has published articles on these topics in Economic Journal, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Economic Literature, and Journal of Political Philosophy, among others. His book, The Haves and the Have-nots (2011) was selected by The Globalist as the 2011 Book of the Year. His new book, Global Inequality (2016), was awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the best political book of 2016 and was translated into twelve languages. It addresses economic and political effects of globalization, including the concept of successive “Kuznets waves” of inequality, largely driven, since the first industrial revolution, by technology and globalization. In October 2017, Branko was awarded (jointly with Mariana Mazzucato) the 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Knowledge.