Global Inequality: From Class to Location, from Proletarians to Migrants

By Branko Milanovic. 2011

137 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Inequality between world citizens in mid-19th century was such that at least a half of it could be explained by income differences between workers and capital-owners in individual countries. Real income of workers in most countries was similar and low. This was the basis on which Marxism built its universal appeal. More than 150 years later, in the early 21st century, the situation has changed fundamentally: more than 80 percent of global income differences is due to large gaps in mean incomes between countries, and unskilled workers' wages in rich and poor countries often differ by a factor of 10 to 1. This is the basis on which a new global political issue of migration has emerged because income differences between countries make individual gains from migration large. The key coming issue will be how to deal with this challenge while acknowledging that migration is probably the most powerful tool for reducing global poverty and inequality.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f4aa08cdbd7f14dd93b65aad7c60273392d3e543

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Citations in the corpus

• Global Income Inequality in Numbers: in History and Now (2013, unknown): “In Milanovic (2012), I have argued that a proper analysis of global inequality today requires an empirical and mental shift from concerns with class to concerns with location; in other words, a movement ‘from proletarians to migrants’.”
• The Past, Present, and Future of Economic Growth (2014, methodology): “Source data come from Milanovic/World Bank as before.”
• Global Inequality of Opportunity: How Much of Our Income Is Determined by Where We Live? (2014, unknown): “17 See, for example, Milanovic (2012).”
• What Remains of Cross-Country Convergence? (2018, background): “Milanovic (2012) estimates that between the early 1800s and 1950, the average per capita income gap between industrial and less developed countries rose from a factor of 3 or 4 to a factor of 20 or more.”
• After Development: Surplus Population and the Politics of Entitlement (2017, background): “The increase in inequality between nations from a ratio of 4:1 in the nineteenth century to 100:1 circa 2000 (Milanovic 2011) is powerful confirmation that for people in poor countries to wait for the rising tide, or for benevolent distribution, is a flawed strategy.”