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Branko Milanovic

@BrankoMilan

28 May

Many years ago when I read Neruda's excellent memoirs (I would suggest the book to everyone), I was a bit puzzled by Neruda going ecstatic in front of every Siberian dam when the same dam would leave him ice- cold in the US.
But then I thought I understood.

A dam built by capitalists is built by clever rich people who try to extract money by selling electricity to the poor. And they are clever enough to have hired the best engineers to do it.

But a dam built by workers is built in order to provide the light and heat to other workers. And workers thereby showed that, however downtrodden and mistreated they historically were, they could match best capitalists.

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Branko Milanovic

@BrankoMilan

23 May

@IsabellaMWeber

(A thread; of interest to few).
Rereading @IsabellaMWeber book, a Q (to me) naturally arises:
Why were Chinese utterly uninterested in Yugoslav socialism? There were important EEuropean participants but no Yugoslav (except A Bajt and his role was minimal).
It is a puzzle.

Yugo (SFRJ) was way ahead in "reforms" compared to HUN, CZE, POL. The issues discussed by Brus, Sik in 1980s in China were issued discussed in SFRJ in 1965. So why were the Chinese uninterested in a more "advanced" socialist reform?

Several possibilities.
1 Chinese invited EEuropean "emigré" economists who tried reforms in their own countries (Kornai does not fit that scheme though). SFRJ had no significant "emigré" economists to invite. The were all in country.

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Branko Milanovic

@BrankoMilan

22 May

@scepticalranil

(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.

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Branko Milanovic

@BrankoMilan

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.

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Branko Milanovic

@BrankoMilan

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.

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Branko Milanovic

@BrankoMilan

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).

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