BiblioVault - Books about Milanovic, Branko

Capitalism, Alone

The Future of the System That Rules the World

Branko Milanovic

Harvard University Press, 2019

An Economist Book of the Year
A Financial Times Book of the Year
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year
A Prospect Best Book of the Year
A ProMarket Book of the Year
An Omidyar Network “8 Storytellers Informing How We’ve been Reimagining Capitalism” Selection

“Brilliant…Poses all the important questions about our future.”
—Gordon Brown

“A scholar of inequality warns that while capitalism may have seen off rival economic systems, the survival of liberal democracies is anything but assured.”
—The Economist

We are all capitalists now. For the first time in human history, the world is dominated by one economic system. At some level capitalism has triumphed because it works: it delivers prosperity and gratifies our desire for autonomy. But this comes at a moral price, pushing us to treat material success as the ultimate goal, and offers no guarantee of stability. While Western liberal capitalism creaks under the strains of inequality and excess, some are flaunting the virtues of political capitalism, exemplified by China, which may be more efficient, but is also vulnerable to corruption and social unrest.

One of the outstanding economists of his generation, Branko Milanovic mines the data to tell his ambitious and compelling story. Capitalism gets a lot wrong, he argues, but also much right—and it isn’t going away anytime soon. Our task is to improve it in the hopes that a more equitable capitalism can take hold.

“Erudite, illuminating…Engaging to read…As a virtuoso economist, Milanovic is superb when he is compiling and assessing data.”
—Robert Kuttner, New York Review of Books

“Leaves little doubt that the social contract no longer holds. Whether you live in Beijing or New York, the time for renegotiation is approaching.”
—Edward Luce, Financial Times

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Global Inequality

A New Approach for the Age of Globalization

Branko Milanovic

Harvard University Press, 2016

Winner of the Bruno Kreisky Prize, Karl Renner Institut
A Financial Times Best Economics Book of the Year
An Economist Best Book of the Year
A Livemint Best Book of the Year

One of the world’s leading economists of inequality, Branko Milanovic presents a bold new account of the dynamics that drive inequality on a global scale. Drawing on vast data sets and cutting-edge research, he explains the benign and malign forces that make inequality rise and fall within and among nations. He also reveals who has been helped the most by globalization, who has been held back, and what policies might tilt the balance toward economic justice.

“The data [Milanovic] provides offer a clearer picture of great economic puzzles, and his bold theorizing chips away at tired economic orthodoxies.”
—The Economist

“Milanovic has written an outstanding book…Informative, wide-ranging, scholarly, imaginative and commendably brief. As you would expect from one of the world’s leading experts on this topic, Milanovic has added significantly to important recent works by Thomas Piketty, Anthony Atkinson and François Bourguignon…Ever-rising inequality looks a highly unlikely combination with any genuine democracy. It is to the credit of Milanovic’s book that it brings out these dangers so clearly, along with the important global successes of the past few decades.
—Martin Wolf, Financial Times

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The Great Global Transformation

The United States, China, and the Remaking of the World Economic Order

Branko Milanovic

University of Chicago Press, 2026

From the essential chronicler of the world economy, a portrait of the Great Powers in transition.

The world’s two great economic powers are on opposite trajectories. In the United States, decades of neoliberal policies produced a small class of rich elites and gutted the middle class. In China, the same global forces have created a massive new upper class. The result is the greatest reshuffling of global incomes since the Industrial Revolution—a dramatic shakeup of each country’s political order. As the two powers retreat from one another, the implications for their futures, and for the world economy, are uncertain.

In The Great Global Transformation, acclaimed economist Branko Milanovic draws on original research to chart how these seismic shifts will shape the next century of the global economy. As both the US and China retreat into protectionism, Milanovic shows how a new and multipolar world order will follow—and how rising nationalism will have dramatically different effects on the two countries. And he shows us the fight ahead: as plutocracy returns, global war threatens, and a new system silently shapes our nations, driving populist discontent to breaking point.

A worthy successor to Capitalism, Alone and his other landmark works, Milanovic’s new book announces the arrival of a new era he terms “national market liberalism,” in which liberalism survives in domestic economies, but not necessarily in the social arena. The Great Global Transformation is Milanovic’s indispensable account of the new twenty-first century now underway.

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Visions of Inequality

From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War

Branko Milanovic

Harvard University Press

A Financial Times Best Economics Book of the Year

“An essential and insightful analysis of the history of economic inequality urgently relevant today…a groundbreaking work, bound to influence the economics profession and our worldview.” —LSE Review of Books

“A history of the changing ways economists have broached the subject [of inequality] since the French Revolution…[Milanovic] describes how Western economists were in thrall to an unholy combination of extremely simplistic assumptions and extremely complex mathematical models.” —New York Times

“A timely book that brings the weight of the past to bear on one of the most pressing issues of our time…Milanovic is a clear and direct writer, unafraid of making strong judgements and with an idiosyncratic eye for detail. That makes for original, and sometimes amusingly wry, revelations.” —Literary Review

“How do you see income distribution in your time, and how and why do you expect it to change?” Branko Milanovic imagines posing this question to six of history’s most influential economists. Probing the works of these key thinkers in the context of their lives, Milanovic charts the evolution of the concept of inequality across the centuries. We cannot speak of inequality in general, he argues: any analysis of it is inextricably linked to a particular time and place.

Visions of Inequality takes us from François Quesnay, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category determined by one’s relation to the means of production. Later, Vilfredo Pareto reconceived class in terms of elites versus the rest, while Simon Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. Milanovic further explores why inequality receded from scholarship during the Cold War, before gaining renewed attention in economics today.

An invaluable intellectual genealogy, Visions of Inequality brings nuanced insight to a hotly contested idea.

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When Markets Fail

Social Policy and Economic Reform

Ethan B. Kapstein

Russell Sage Foundation, 2002

The sweeping political and economic changes of the past decade—including the spread of democracy, pro-market policies, and economic globalization—have dramatically increased the demand in developing countries for social programs such as unemployment compensation, pensions, and income supplements for the poor. When Markets Fail examines how emerging market economies in Eastern Europe, Latin America, North Africa, and the Middle East are shaping their social policies in response to these changes. The contributors—leading scholars of development and social policy—use detailed case studies to examine whether the emerging economies are likely to move toward European-style welfare systems, characterized by high unemployment benefits and large entitlements, or if they will opt for more austere, stripped-down welfare regimes. They find that much will depend on how well emerging economies perform economically, but that the political forces, ideological preferences, and historical backgrounds of each country will also play a decisive role. In his chapter on Central and Eastern Europe, Peter Lindert focuses on how aging populations and the fall of communism have fostered increased need for social assistance in the region. In contrast, Nancy Birdsall and Stephen Haggard highlight the positive role of democratization and Western-style social programs in promoting East Asian social policies. Zafiris Tzannatos and Iqbal Kaur argue that governments in North Africa and the Middle East must foster both human capital formation and competition in the market for social services if they are to meet the growing need for services. When Markets Fail presents some evidence that a global convergence in social policies may be taking place: as Europe slowly makes its welfare provisions less generous, the emerging market economies will be under increasing demographic and political pressure to make their social welfare systems more comprehensive. The book also examines the vital role that organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Asian Development Bank can play in fostering effective social services in developing economies. Economic globalization and political liberalization have produced many economic winners around the world, but these forces have created losers as well. When Markets Fail addresses the problem of how governments in developing countries have responded to the plight of those losers through social policy. The success of these policies, however, remains sharply contested, as is their role in helping to achieve meaningful poverty reduction. When Markets Fail is essential reading for anyone interested in economic liberalization and its consequences for the developing world.

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