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Branko Milanovic Profile picture
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22 May, 6 tweets, 2 min read
(Long thread on Africa)
I enjoy reading @scepticalranil weekend Economics & Marginalia. They are great commentated weekly summaries of the new in development and around development.
In his latest
cgdev.org/blog/economics…
Ranil kindly comments on my recent "primer" on global inequality. He likes it, but he thinks that I am wrong on the lack of African convergence. But while there is unconditional convergence in the world, this is thanks to Asia. Not Africa.

glineq.blogspot.com/2021/05/notes-…
Look at the next picture: it gives you the ratio of Sub Saharan Africa's population-weighted GDPpc to the global mean GDPpc (all in international dollars).
It shows that around independence Africa's GDPpc was about 1/2 of the world level.
Then, it steadily declined so much that today it is only 0.22.
Africa's growth slightly improved after the disastrous 1990s, but even so, it failed to converge--most recently the ratio fell even further.
It shows that unless Africa *dramatically* increases its per capita growth (which would be additionally difficult as its population growth rate is high), the world may again enter a period of rising global inequality.
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More from @BrankoMilan

Branko Milanovic Profile picture
19 May
I faced this "my nation is being exploited" problem in 1987 when I did my dissertation on income inequality in Yugoslavia. Household surveys (run since 1963) had data on 6 republics plus 2 provinces, and for 4 social groups (worker, farmer, mixed & pensioner households).
You could realistically choose either to be a "Marxist" and look how inequality between and within social groups evolved, or to be a "nationalist" and do the same for republics.
It was quasi impossible to do for both because you would have 8x4=32 partitions for each year.
I chose the "Marxist" approach which was problematic b/c within each social group, most of the income gap was due to the fact that e.g. workers in different republics had systematically different wages.
So nationalist approach would have made some (or more) sense.
Read 5 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
17 May
I am surprised that people reacted so strongly to my comment (both positively and negatively). The answer to my comment is not to list multiple area-studies articles. The answer is to consider whether the following is true or not:
1 The number of alternative political regimes has expanded significantly since 1990s whereas the number of economic regimes has shrunk.
2 But my *impression* is that most of new ways to organize political life are considered as "failed" or "fallen" democracies--while they may...
...be genuinely new durable types. It seems to me that e.g. the Iranian system with pre-vetted candidates and yet free elections is a system that cannot be just seen as "imperfect democracy".
Similar for royalist full-franchise w/o responsible govt like Jordan and Morocco.
Read 5 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
13 May
One of the critiques of my immigration proposal in “C,A” of multi-tiered citizenship is that it is not novel; it exists in many countries. I see that point. But it focuses only on the end point of the analysis and not on how I get there, which is important.
My tiered citizenship is derived against the background of desirable full mobility of labor (worldwide), existence of citizenship premium, defense by that premium by indigenous populations, and trade-off between migration and migrants' rights (faced by indigenous population).
So to come to the tiered citizenship I go through all these steps which are important in order to understand the logic of the proposal; but also to see what would change if one of these steps were to changed (e.g. if the premium goes down; if the trade-off becomes sharper etc).
Read 9 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
7 May
It is instructive to read Tocqueville and Marx discuss the 1848 revolution. It does not often happen to have two such heavyweights describe the same events as they happen (w/o a historical "recul").
Marx's "18th Brumaire" was written in 1852,
journal articles (collected in "The Class struggles in France") as the revolution occurred; Tocqueville's "Souvenirs" in 1850.
Both agree in the sociological analysis of Louis Phillippe's rule. They disagree on June 1848 when workers' demonstrations were crushed.
T's book is memoirs; so it is more personal and is written from the point of view of a participant.
It is probably better written than Marx's, but is weaker in the overall social dimension, perhaps because it ends too early, before Louis Napoleon's coup.
Read 8 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
3 May
The most interesting points from the paper by Yang, Novokmet and @BrankoMilan on China elite's transformation 1988-2013 forthcoming in British Journal of Sociology.
wid.world/wp-content/upl…
"The percentage of people among the top [richest] 5 percent whose incomes are private sector related increased from 5% in 1988 to almost 40% in 2013."
"The rising importance of private and individual
business owners among the top 5% is due to an overall increase in the numbers of capitalists, who also tend to be much richer than the average person, rather than the product of an exceptional enrichment of business owners as such"
Read 8 tweets
Branko Milanovic Profile picture
30 Apr
(Thread)
The table below is useful to situate Western income distribution within global income distribution and to realize the problems linked with the idea of degrowth (i.e., of keeping global income fixed).
Column 1 shows that an average-income WENAO citizen is about three times as rich as an average person in the world ($52/$16=3.2), and the median income WENAO person is about 6 times better off than the global median person ($41/$7).
Column 2 shows that a median-income WENAO person is at the 90-91 global percentile. If the entire world were to be "allowed" to have income of the median WENAO person, world total GDP would have to rise 2.6 times ($41/$16).
Read 6 tweets

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