Branko Milanovic (PhD in Economics) was a chief economist at the World Bank, where he wrote a report on the economic consequences of the transition from socialism to a market economy in the 1990s. He has taught at several American universities and is currently a professor at the Graduate Center of Cuny University in New York, and an associate researcher at LIS, a research center on inequalities.
He was made famous by his study on global inequality. His 2016 book, Global Inequalities, analyzes the different effects of globalization by social class and country. He notes that globalization has benefited the poorest in Asian countries and the richest in Western countries, to the detriment of the working and middle classes whose wealth depends mainly on income from their work. He translates this observation into the so-called “elephant curve”, with the distribution of individuals according to their income on the x-axis (the poorest on the left, the richest on the right), and the progression of income between 1988 and 2008 on the y-axis.
