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 September 2024
Branko Milanovic explores what divides and unites East European and Russian elites. (I will not provide any citation in this article because it is not academic writing.…
16 September 2024
Branko Milanovic asks whether an international economic system can exist in a world of nationalisms? The post World War II international economic organizations were conceived…
27 August 2024
A review of Gary Gerstle’s “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order”. The very well-written and easy to read book by Gary Gerstle (The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order)…
19 August 2024
Branko Milanovic - Wars and ideology simplified. Recently, a Chinese author (as seems from the text and the Chinese characters used) proposed the following understanding of…
01 August 2024
Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation is one of these famous books whose ideas have been so absorbed into social sciences that the books themselves are no longer read. This would be…
22 July 2024
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History. Lea Ypi. Penguin. 2021 It is not often that one in the process of learning of, or reading, a book develops three different opinions…
16 July 2024
Shlomo Avineri’s Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution is an excellent introduction to some parts of Marx’s philosophy, but a very truncated book as far as other parts of Marx’s…
21 June 2024
The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary D. Carter. Random House Publishing Group; Reprint edition (20 April 2021) Zachary Carter’s…
20 May 2024
In classical Marxism, communism is defined as a society of material abundance. It is a society where goods flow in abundance (“after the productive forces have…increased…all the…
13 May 2024
Branko Milanovic unpicks the motives of those cracking down on campus protests. I have seen, and read about, of many instances when the police would clear universities of students…
16 April 2024
Branko Milanovic explores secessionism and the collapse of Communist federations. Vladislav M. Zubok’s splendid “Collapse” is a chronicle of the break-up of the Soviet Union. It…
12 April 2024
Branko Milanovic on the logical fallacies rich countries indulge when ignoring the connections between poverty and climate change. The Industrial Revolution in North-Western…
28 March 2024
Branko Milanovic on the joys of bookstores. I always loved Saturdays. When I was a college student, quite improbably my parents decided that I would be a “technical executor…
13 March 2024
In response to recent interest, Branko Milanovic explores whether Burnham’s ideas have stood the test of time. Like everybody who has studied Marxism from a relatively young age I…
19 February 2024
Branko Milanovic on why the liberal project will fail. Several things came together. A friend sent me this post by N S Lyons. Then, independently, a short conversation on…