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

02 July 2018
My first World Cup was the one in Chile in 1962. In those days, there were no satellites to beam the picture directly from South America to Europe so the live games were listened…
01 June 2018
I have already written  before (in a tweet) that no one who travels through Western Europe, especially in Summer, can fail to be impressed by the wealth and beauty of the…
16 May 2018
The Balkans are an odd man in Europe. Its income level is much lower than the average income level of Western and Central Europe. This is a well-known fact but is worth of another…
20 March 2018
Capital: The explosion of Delhi by Rana Dasgupta. Penguin Books. It is the story of Delhi, the city of imperial courts, colonialist city-planners and above all of administrators…
09 March 2018
(I am publishing early and somewhat modified versions of self-contained sections  from my forthcoming book “Capitalism, alone”, Harvard UP, hopefully 2019. They may be a bit…
19 February 2018
Branko Milanovic poses an age of old question.  It is Saturday evening and snowing in New York. I have nowhere to go, I do have things to do (my book!) but my memories take…
06 February 2018
Branko Milanovic revisits his earlier readings of Adam Smith. Under the influence of Amartya Sen, we have been “nudged” towards a reassessment of the relative merits of “The…
29 January 2018
Branko Milanovic explores the impact and importance of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's work.  Several weeks ago on Twitter I wrote (in an obviously very short form) why I thought…
24 January 2018
Branko Milanovic explores what may be on and off the table at Davos. You will find me eager to help you, but slow to take any step. Euripides, Hecuba Thousands of people will…
18 January 2018
Branko Milanovic how China’s rise might affect the international political order? “When China Rules the World” (no question mark or conditional tense) by Martin Jacques is a large…
08 January 2018
Branko Milanovic sketches a reformulated version of Schumpeter’s theory imperialism. Recently Thomas Hauner, Suresh Naidu and I published the draft of a joint piece (…
18 December 2017
Branko Milanovic explores the future of global inequality and the questions it poses for Western societies.  There is perhaps no better short-hand description of the economic…