Branko Milanovic will discuss recent changes in global income distribution, the creation of a “global middle class”, stagnation of median incomes in the West and propose Kuznets cycles as a useful tool to understand these changes and their future evolution.

Branko Milanovic is a leading scholar on income inequality. He is Presidential fellow at City University of New York, Visiting Presidential Professor and Senior Scholar in the Luxembourg Income Studies Center. He previously served as Lead Economist in the World Bank's research department. He is the author of The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality, as well as numerous articles on methodology and empirics of global income distribution and effects of globalization.