Branko Milanovic Quotes

The main issue [of the Scientific Revolution] is that the people in the industrialised countries are getting richer, and those in the non-industrialised countries are at best standing still: so the gap between the industrialised countries and the rest is widening every day. On the world scale this is the gap between the rich and the poor.

Most people believe that inequality is rising - and indeed it has been rising for a while in a number of rich countries. And there is lots of talk and realization of this. It's harder to understand that at the same time, you can actually have global inequality going down. Technically speaking, national inequality can increase in every single country and yet global inequality can go down. And why it is going down is because very large, populous, and relatively poor countries like India and China are growing quite fast.

Globalization has benefited middle-income less than either richer or poorer countries.

While a few poor countries are catching up with the rich world, the differences between the richest and poorest individuals around the globe are huge and likely growing.

Economically, unfair trade will benefit nobody in the long run, as poorer countries will be bled totally dry and will become unable to produce anything.

Rich countries have been sending aid to poor countries for the last 60 years. And, by and large, this has failed.

It became clear I wanted to be a development economist. I mean, I said I wanted to work on the economics of poor countries. And I'd actually say that I don't think that was so much about narrowing the gap as about increasing their incomes, which means economic growth, which is really my prime interest.

Never forget that there are rich people in poor countries and poor people in rich countries.

Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries

The developing world is poor. It needs capital.

Every country has a part that is undeveloped.

We see a small number of countries getting rich at the cost of impoverishment of a large number of other countries.

The biggest drag on global growth in the coming decade will be income polarization.

What separates developing countries from developed countries is as much a gap in knowledge as a gap in resources.

By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world. Almost all countries will be what we now call lower-middle income or richer.

I understand we're on our way to being a Third World country. Could we just stop at 'Second World' before we get there?

Unfortunately, the current pace of progress is not nearly rapid enough, with many rich industrialised countries being slow to make the transition to cleaner and more efficient forms of economic growth.

China hasn't only existed for one day. Now, the whole nation has become richer and it's become a problem. The problem is universal. The factor is big. Everybody has to rethink the balance of the world and the whole landscape.

This is the first global crisis that doesn't start in poor countries and it was caused by the rich countries. So it's necessary to take advantage of this crisis - the financial system has to be regulated. It's necessary that the central banks in the world should control a little bit the banks' financing, because they cannot bypass a certain range of leverage. And I believe that there's no other - more any reason for a G-8 group or any other "G." I believe that we should guarantee that the G-20 should be now an important forum to discuss the major economic issues of the world.

Climate change is a huge problem, an almost insoluble problem, for two reasons. One is the habits of the West in terms of consumption. The other is the incredible iniquity between poor countries and rich countries on this planet.

In China, it was always said that a double-digit rate of growth would be dangerous. Now, the country has a growth rate of 6.9 percent and suddenly that is supposed to be a catastrophe for the global economy.

The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment under neo-colonialism increases rather than decreases the gap between the rich and poor countries of the world.

The median family income in the U.S. is lower than it was a quarter-century ago, and if people don't have income, they can't consume, and you can't have a strong economy. There's significant risk - actually it's no longer a risk - a significant likelihood of a marked slowdown not only in China, but also in a lot of other countries like Brazil, which is in recession. All of the other countries that depend on commodities, including Canada, are facing difficulties. So it's hard to see a story of a strong U.S. economy.

If you wanna maintain 20 percent of the world's income with 4 percent of the world's people, you gotta first of all have more shared prosperity and shared growth.

People in the big rich countries are often extremely dismissive of the small countries. They think nothing that happens there is of any interest or that it matters at all, but, at the very least, with that attitude they miss out on some extraordinary stories.