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.[14]
He has published a large number of papers, including forty for the World Bank,[10] 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".[15]
Milanovic is the author of 2011's The Haves and the Have-Nots, a collection of essays on income distribution,[9] selected by The GlobalistThe Haves and the Have-Nots as the number one book on its "top books of 2011" list.[16][17]
He has written the blogglobalinequality since May 2014.[20]
His book Global inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization was published in April 2016.[21] 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,[22] the 2018 Hans Matthöfer Prize for the best book in economics awarded by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation,[23] and was included in the Financial Times 12 top books in business and economics published in 2016.[24] He received, together with Mariana Mazzucato, the 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.[25]
His book Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System that Rules the World was published in September 2019.[26] It was included by the Foreign Affairs magazine on the Best Books list for 2020.[27] In July 2020, the magazine Prospect included him among the top 50 thinkers for the year 2020.[28]
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.[29] 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.[30]
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.[31] 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."[32]
(with Marco Ranaldi), “Capitalist systems and income inequality”, Journal of Comparative Economics, 2021
(with Li Yang and Filip Novokmet), “From workers to capitalists in less than two generations: A study of Chinese urban elite transformation between 1988 and 2013”, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 72, No. 3, June 2021.
“Towards an explanation of inequality in pre-modern societies: the role of colonies and high population density”, The Economic History Review, vol. 71, No. 4, 2018.
(with Christoph Lakner), “Global income distribution: from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession”, World Bank Economic Review, vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 203–232, July 2016.
(with Leif Wenar) “Are Liberal Peoples Peaceful?”, Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 17, Issue 4, 2009.
Global inequality of opportunity: how much of our income is determined by where we live”, Review of Economics and Statistics, vol. 97, No. 2 (May), 2015.
(with Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson), “Pre-industrial inequality”, Economic Journal, March 2011,
“An estimate of average income and inequality in Byzantium around year 1000”, Review of Income and Wealth, vol. 52, No. 3, 2006.
“Economic integration and income convergence: not such a strong link?”, Review of Economics and Statistics, vol. 88, No, 4, 2006.
“Can We Discern the Effect of Globalization on Income Distribution? Evidence from Household Budget Surveys", World Bank Economic Review, No. 1, 2005.
“The Two Faces of Globalization: Against Globalization as We Know it”, World Development, April 2003, pp. 667–683.
(with Shlomo Yitzhaki), "Decomposing World Income Distribution: Does the World Have a Middle Class?", Review of Income and Wealth, Vol. 48, No. 2, June 2002.
“True World Income Distribution, 1988 and 1993: First Calculations Based on Household Surveys Alone”, Economic Journal, vol. 112, No. 476, January 2002.
"Cash Transfers, Direct Taxes and Income Distribution in Late Socialism", Journal of Comparative Economics, No.2, 1994.
"Remittances and Income Distribution", Journal of Economic Studies, No.5, 1987.
"Patterns of Regional Growth in Yugoslavia, 1952 1983", Journal of Development Economics, vol. 25, 1987.
"The Austrian Theory of the Labor Managed Firm", Journal of Comparative Economics, No.6, 1982.
