Branko Milanović

His book Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System that Rules the World was published in September 2019. It was included by Foreign Affairs on the list of Best Books of 2020. In July 2020, the magazine Prospect included him among the top 50 thinkers in the year 2020.

Branko Milanović (Serbian Cyrillic: Бранко Милановић, IPA: [brǎːŋko mǐlanoʋitɕ; milǎːn-]) is a Serbian-American economist. He is most known for his work on income distribution and inequality. Since January 2014, he has been a visiting presidential 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.

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) 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-Stiftung and was included among 12 top books in business and economics published in 2016 by the Financial Times. He received, together with Mariana Mazzucato, the 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.

Milanovic is the author of 2011's The Haves and the Have-Nots, a book of essays on income distribution; The Globalist selected The Haves and the Have-Nots as number one on its "top books of 2011". 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 has published a large number of papers, including some 40 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 all 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".

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 the dissertation 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 is widely known for his "elephant" curve that shows that those around the 70th–90th percentile in global income, roughly corresponding to lower earners in the developed world, have missed out on real income growth over the last 20 years.