Branko Milanovic is a Research Professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), Senior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-economic Inequality at CUNY, and Visiting Professor at the Institute for International Inequalities at the London School of Economics. In 2019 he was appointed the honorary Maddison Chair at the University of Groningen.

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 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). He was a visiting scholar at All Souls College in Oxford, and Universidad Carlos III in Madrid (2010-11).

Branko’s main area of work is income inequality, in individual countries and globally, including in pre-industrial societies. He has published articles in The Economic Journal, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Economic Literature, Nature, Economic History Review, 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 book Global Inequality (2016), was awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the best political book of 2016, and Hans Matthöfer Prize in 2018, and was translated into sixteen languages. It addresses economic and political effects of globalization and introduces the concept of successive “Kuznets waves” of inequality. In March 2018, Branko was awarded (jointly with Mariana Mazzucato) the 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Knowledge. His book Capitalism, Alone was published in September 2019. It studies inequality formation and its persistence under two different systems: liberal capitalism (as in the United States) and political capitalism (as in China). The book was translated into 15 languages. His most recent book Visions of Inequality was published in October 2023. It is an intellectual history of views on income distribution and inequality from Quesnay and Adam Smith to the end of the 20th century.

He has contributed numerous op eds and essays to (among others) Foreign Affairs, Social Europe, VoxEU, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Economic and Political Weekly, Vox, The Financial Times, Le Monde, El Pais, La Vanguardia, Le Monde Diplomatique and blogs ProMarket (U of Chicago), Global Policy (Durham University), Brave New Europe (Berlin) etc. He maintains an active Substack, Global Inequality and More 3.0. His blog posts are regularly translated into Spanish (Letras Libres), German (Makronom), Italian (Fata Turchina), French (Atlanico), Serbian (Pescanik) and Turkish.