Leading professor of inequality Branko Milanovic appointed Maddison Chair

FEB is delighted to be joined by Professor Branko Milanovic as the new Maddison Chair. The Maddison Chair was founded in 2010 to commemorate and further the academic work and international reputation of the late Groningen professor Angus Maddison (1926-2010).

Professor Branko Milanovic is the third person to hold the position, succeeding Professors Leandro Prados de la Escosura and Jan Luiten van Zanden. He will build on the work of his predecessors in furthering the academic legacy of Angus Maddison in global economics, tracing the comparative development of individual countries around the world and the causes for divergence and tracing the history of economic development in pre-industrial times, focusing on inequality and its roots in history.

Milanovic will focus on the areas that have made his name as a leading global economist: tracing the history of inequality and economic development from pre-industrial times in individual countries and internationally, research that has furnished his many academic publications and acclaimed books Worlds Apart(2005) The Haves and the Have-Nots(2011), Global inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization(2016), andCapitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World(2019). As Maddison Chair, Milanovic will engage with Groningen researchers and students in the area of economic development, for example, as a keynote speaker at the upcoming 2020 conference of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre.

Milanovic is a visiting presidential professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY, a senior scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-economic Inequality and the Luxembourg Income Study, and teaches at the London School of Economics and the Barcelona Institute for International Studies. He earned his PhD in economics (1987) from the University of Belgrade with a dissertation on income inequality in Yugoslavia, pioneering the approach of using microdata from household surveys. He went on to lead the research department of the World Bank, for which he wrote some 40 publications. Milanovic delivered the University of Groningen's Maddison Lecture in Economic Growth and Development, on the topic Rewriting history: global inequality since 1820.