Branko Milanovic is a Visiting Presidential Professor at the Graduate Center City University of New York. Previously he was lead economist in World Bank Research Department (1991-2013); College Park professor, University of Maryland (2007-2013); long-term visiting professor at SAIS, Johns Hopkins University (1997-2007) and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington (2003-2005).
Branko Milanovic’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: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality», was published in December 2010, translated in seven languages, and selected by The Globalist as 2011 Book of the Year.
His 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.
Most recently, his book «Capitalism Alone» is a provocative account of capitalism’s rise to global dominance and, as different models of capitalism vie for world leadership, a look into what the future may hold. Also, Milanovic argues that capitalism has triumphed because it works. It delivers prosperity and gratifies human desires for autonomy, but it comes with a moral price, pushing us to treat material success as the ultimate goal.
He is more widely known for his “elephant” curve that shows that those around the 70th-90th percentile global income, roughly corresponding to lower earners in the developed world, have missed out on real income growth over that last 20 years.
Branko Milanovic currently 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 external fellow in Center for Global Development in Washington. He writes the blog globalinequality since May 2014. In October 2017, Milanovic was awarded (jointly with Mariana Mazzucato) the 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Knowledge.
He did his Ph.D. at the University of Belgrade in 1987 on the dissertation on economic inequality in Yugoslavia, using for the first time micro data from Yugoslav household surveys.