Branko Milanovic's Works

Distinguish within-country inequality, between-country inequality, and global interpersonal inequality.

Decompose global interpersonal inequality conceptually into within-country and between-country components.

Explain how Milanović constructs and interprets the global growth-incidence curve known as the “elephant curve.”

Identify the groups represented at key points of the elephant curve without treating income percentiles as fixed populations.

Evaluate what the elephant curve does and does not establish in light of major methodological criticisms.

Contrast Milanović’s Kuznets waves with the original Kuznets curve.

Explain how technology, globalization, demography, and policy can generate successive rises and falls in inequality.

Explain Milanović’s concept of the citizenship premium as an income advantage associated with place of birth or residence.

Analyze why migration can reduce global inequality while creating political conflict over national distribution and membership.

Compare liberal meritocratic capitalism and political capitalism using Milanović’s defining institutional features.

Explain how homoploutia—the concentration of both labor and capital income among the same people—reinforces inequality.

Analyze how assortative mating and intergenerational wealth transmission challenge liberal capitalism’s meritocratic justification.

Explain Milanović’s argument that corruption in political capitalism is connected to the system’s discretionary use of power.

Contrast Milanović’s approach to inequality with one major predecessor discussed in his histories of economic thought.

Construct an evidence-based assessment of the central claim that contemporary inequality must be analyzed globally as well as nationally.