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

30 November 2023
Branko Milanovic on why three global trends - runaway inflation, wrecking of democracy, and the rise of antisemitism - are dominating political conversations in Germany. I…
07 November 2023
Branko Milanovic explores new research on why there is no riding off into the sunset for dictators. In an interesting paper, Kaushik Basu discusses, using a mathematical model, an…
18 October 2023
Branko Milanovic with some words of advice for our polarised times. Over the years I have had political and ideological discussions with at least three groups of people and have…
03 October 2023
Branko Milanovic on why Vučić may go for war and the difficult position that would put NATO in. I learned about the newest dispute between Serbia and Kosovo in a New York café…
20 September 2023
Branko Milanovic explores the impact of the Cultural Revolutions of the 1960s-70 on himself, and the East and West. As I suppose many older people do, I was thinking about…
07 September 2023
Branko Milanovic argues that the BRICS countries' increasing independence and clout may be a net good for pressing global problems.  The expansion of BRICS membership is…
22 August 2023
Branko Milanovic explores what Adam Smith got wrong about the abolition of slavery. When I wrote my chapter on Adam Smith in The Visions of Inequality (to be published October 10…
10 August 2023
Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea by Darrin McMahon. Basic Books. 2023. The ideological history of the idea of equality (“Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea”) is an…
01 August 2023
Branko Milanovic discusses inequality, the great convergence, Ukraine and China.  What is your take on the riots that are going on in France at the moment?  …
11 July 2023
Branko Milanovic on the consequences of inequalities between states. There is a news items today that, in simply reaffirming in an extreme form what was happening in the past…
05 July 2023
Branko Milanovic argues that we should regard the future of globalization as a trade-off between unconstrained geopolitical power and higher real domestic incomes. “The…
28 June 2023
Did capitalism lead inevitably to democracy? Can liberalism overcome the ascendant authoritarian right? Branko Milanovic explores Krishnan Nayar's impressive new book. Krishnan…
21 June 2023
Branko Milanovic argues that the myth has been busted for those that believed capitalism can be successful and ethical. What “Succession” serves us is the end of the illusion…
14 November 2022
Fritz Bartel (2022) The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism. Harvard University Press.  The turning point in the economic fortunes of…
19 October 2022
Branko Milanovic warns that those who argue that the West should abandon globalization must explain such a move to the rest of the world. I went to Rana Faroohar’s book party in…