Branko Milanović (Бранко Милановић, ) is a Serbian-American economist. He is most known for his work on income distribution and inequality. Since January 2014, he has been a research professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and an affiliated senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). He also teaches at the London School of Economics and the Barcelona Institute for International Studies. In 2019, he has been appointed the honorary Maddison Chair at the University of Groningen. Milanović formerly was a lead economist in the World Bank's research department, visiting professor at University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University. Between 2003 and 2005 he was senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. He remained an adjunct scholar with the Endowment until early 2010. He did his Ph.D. at the University of Belgrade in 1987 on economic inequality in Yugoslavia, using for the first time micro data from Yugoslav household surveys. He published it as a book in 1990. He has been a visiting scholar at All Souls College in Oxford.

Early life

Branko Milanović was born in 1953 in Yugoslavia. His father was a government official. Later in life, he recalled watching the protests of 1968, when students, "sporting red Karl Marx badges," occupied the University of Belgrade campus with banners proclaiming “Down with the Red bourgeoisie!” and wondering whether he and his family belonged in that group. He said that "the social and political aspects of the protests became clearer later" to him.

Scholarly work on inequality

He has published a large number of papers, including forty for the World Bank, mainly on world inequality and poverty. His 2005 book, Worlds Apart covered global income disparity between countries as well as between individuals in the world. His joint work with Jeffrey Williamson and Peter Lindert ("Economic Journal", March 2011), was considered by The Economist to "contain the germ of an important advance in thinking about inequality". Milanovic is the author of 2011's The Haves and the Have-Nots, a collection of essays on income distribution, selected by The Globalist The Haves and the Have-Nots as the number one book on its "top books of 2011" list. Milanovic serves on the advisory board for Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP). In August 2013, he was included by Foreign Policy among the top 100 "twitterati" to follow. In November 2014, he became an external fellow of the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC. He has written the blog globalinequality since May 2014. His book Global inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization was published in April 2016. The book, in its German translation (Die ungleiche Welt. Migration, das Eine Prozent, und die Zukunft der Mittelschicht, "The Unequal World. Immigration, the one percent, and the future of the middle class"), received the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the best political book of 2016, the 2018 Hans Matthöfer Prize for the best book in economics awarded by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, and was included in the Financial Times 12 top books in business and economics published in 2016. He received, together with Mariana Mazzucato, the 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. His book Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System that Rules the World was published in September 2019. It was included by the Foreign Affairs magazine on the Best Books list for 2020. In July 2020, the magazine Prospect included him among the top 50 thinkers for the year 2020.

The elephant curve

Milanović became widely known for the "elephant-shaped curve" that first appeared in a 2013 article titled "Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession", co-written with Christoph Lakner, senior economist of the World Bank. The graph showed that those around the 70th–90th percentile in global income, roughly corresponding to the lower earners in the developed world, had missed out on real-income growth over the twenty years between 1988 and 2008. In 2020, he published an update of the global-growth curve, which ostensibly showed how the distribution of income growth has changed in the years following 2008. The data showed that, since the 2007-08 financial crisis, the incomes of the poorest people in the world have risen the fastest. The Financial Times commented that "the latest data indicates a clear link between trade integration and falling global inequality" and "a large reduction in global inequality over the past decade" but "again requires careful interpretation" because "as Milanovic says, over the past 30 years there has been 'the greatest reshuffle of individual income positions since the Industrial Revolution'", resulting, among other developments, in "lower-income urban Chinese households, who came close to the bottom of the global distribution in 1988, now enjoy[ing] living standards above the global median."

Selected works

Books

Articles