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

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…
20 June 2019
Branko Milanovic asks if our life is a CV, what kind of social scientist will we make?   Recently I read, rather by accident than design,  short lives of…
29 May 2019
Branko Milanovic on the exciting ideological choices facing the world's youth.   When I was young and would overhear (rare) conversations that my father and his friends…
24 May 2019
The China boom: Why China will not rule the world by Ho-fung Hung. Published 2015 by Columbia University Press.   I read with pleasure the recent book “The China boom: Why China…
06 May 2019
Branko Milanovic on why the Chinese or Singaporean models of political organisation may prove to appealing to others.   Last night, in a response to something I had written…
26 April 2019
To think correctly about globalization one needs to think of it in historical context. This means seeing today’s globalization and its effects, positive and negative, as in many…
03 April 2019
Fukuyama, F. 2012. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. FARRAR STRAUS & GIROUX.    I mentioned in my last post in which I reviewed…
28 March 2019
Fukuyama, F. 2012. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. FARRAR STRAUS & GIROUX.    How do you write about a book that is almost 600…
28 February 2019
Branko Milanovic on the materials each dictator had to work with and what they meant for their legacies. Tito and Franco could not be, in many ways, more different: they were the…
19 February 2019
Jean-Pierre Cabestan, 2018. Demain la Chine : démocratie ou dictature? Collection Le Débat, Gallimard.   Should you write reviews of bad books? Obviously not if the book is so bad…
11 February 2019
Branko Milanovic on Jason Hickel's important considerations for those interested in long-term global poverty rates.   I became somewhat peripherally involved in the…
06 February 2019
Branko Milanovic on Marxism's religion-like ability to address fear.   A couple of days ago, I was writing a part of my forthcoming book (with the provisional, and not…
28 January 2019
Branko Milanovic on why orderly states often tolerate vice.   When you travel from a less orderly country (which is practically every country in the world save Singapore…
22 January 2019
Branko Milanovic looks at Russia's past to explore its possible economic futures.   Today I participated in a nice web-based program started by the Central Bank of Russia (it…