Branko Milanović (Serbian Cyrillic: Бранко Милановић, IPA: [brǎːŋko mǐlanoʋitɕ; milǎːn-])[2] is a Serbian-American economist.

Since January 2014, he has been a research professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and an affiliated senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS).

[12] He did his Ph.D. at the University of Belgrade in 1987 on economic inequality in Yugoslavia, using for the first time micro data from Yugoslav household surveys.

His joint work with Jeffrey Williamson and Peter Lindert ("Economic Journal", March 2011), was considered by The Economist to "contain the germ of an important advance in thinking about inequality".

[28] Milanović became widely known for the "elephant-shaped curve" that first appeared in a 2013 article titled "Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession", co-written with Christoph Lakner, senior economist of the World Bank.

[29] The graph showed that those around the 70th–90th percentile in global income, roughly corresponding to the lower earners in the developed world, had missed out on real-income growth over the twenty years between 1988 and 2008.

[30] In 2020, he published an update of the global-growth curve, which ostensibly showed how the distribution of income growth has changed in the years following 2008.