Branko Milanovic

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.

Post Archive

14 May 2020
Branko Milanovic on why Trump represents unashamed neoliberalism.  Modern capitalism societies are built on a dichotomy: in the political space decisions are (to be)…
27 February 2020
Following on from his previous post, Branko Milanovic further explores the difficulty of comparing wealth over the ages and across societies.    A few days ago I…
20 February 2020
Branko Milanovic explores the difficulty of comparing wealth over the ages and across societies.    It seems obvious. Let me start with the definitions that economists who work on…
10 February 2020
Branko Milanovic explores three ways capitalism may be transcended.   After the crisis of 2007-8, capitalism has entered among some parts of the public opinion into an…
17 December 2019
Richard McGregor’s Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan and the Fate of US Power in the Pacific Century has, according to the numerous blurbs on the cover and comments on the Amazon,…
04 December 2019
Branko Milanovic reviews Francis Fukuyama’s Political Order and Political Decay.   I have reviewed Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order (OPO)…
25 November 2019
Branko Milanovic explores what connects the wave of protests sweeping the world.   “The specter is haunting [the world]. The specter of … [what?]". While Marx and other…
30 October 2019
Branko Milanovic explores the meaning of recent protests in Chile.   It is not common for an OECD county to shoot and kill 16 people in two days of socially motivated riots. (…
16 October 2019
Branko Milanovic on why the 'crisis of capitalism' is really about its own rapid expansion.    There has recently been an avalanche of articles and books about the ¨…
01 October 2019
Branko Milanovic explores a less described aspects of the dictator's mode of governance.    When I was recently in St Petersburg, I bought in one of the very nice…
02 September 2019
Branko Milanovic argues that the international community has an important role to play in halting Argentina's economic decline.   It is by pure coincidence that I…
12 August 2019
The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier. 2018. Penguin. ISBN: 0062748653   Paul Collier’s new book “The future of capitalism” is a very hard book to…
01 August 2019
Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination by Robert Bickers. Harvard University Press. 2017.   This is not a book about Chinese history as such. It is a…
15 July 2019
Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World by Samuel Moyn. 2018. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674737563   There is a Chinese saying about two people sharing the same bed…
04 July 2019
Branko Milanovic uses Olsen's roving and stationary bandits framework to explain Russia's contemporary oligarchs.   Vladimir Putin’s recent interview to the Financial…