Maddison Chair for Prof Dr Branko Milanovic (2019)
Professor Branko Milanovic has been appointed the honorary Maddison Chair at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Groningen. The Chair was founded in 2010 to commemorate and further the academic work and international reputation of the late Groningen professor Angus Maddison (1926-2010).
The faculty is delighted to be joined by Milanovic as the new Maddison Chair. Milanovic is the third person to hold the position, succeeding Professors Leandro Prados de la Escosura and Jan Luiten van Zanden. He will build on the work of his predecessors in furthering the academic legacy of Angus Maddison in global economics, tracing the comparative development of individual countries around the world and the causes for divergence and tracing the history of economic development in pre-industrial times, focusing on inequality and its roots in history
"Branko Milanovic is a pioneering scholar of global inequality, and is a perfect fit to contribute to our research program on economic development around the world," said Professor of Economic History Herman de Jong. "The Maddison Chair was founded to celebrate and continue the work of the late Groningen professor Angus Maddison, and Milanovic is the ideal person to take forward his work answering the question of why some countries become rich, and others remain poor.”
Milanovic will focus on the areas that have made his name as a leading global economist: tracing the history of inequality and economic development from pre-industrial times in individual countries and internationally, research that has furnished his many academic publications and acclaimed books Worlds Apart(2005) The Haves and the Have-Nots(2011), Global inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization(2016), andCapitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World(2019). As Maddison Chair, Milanovic will engage with Groningen researchers and students in the area of economic development, for example, as a keynote speaker at the upcoming 2020 conference of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre.
From the World Bank to Groningen
Milanovic is a visiting presidential professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY, a senior scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-economic Inequality and the Luxembourg Income Study, and teaches at the London School of Economics and the Barcelona Institute for International Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in economics (1987) from the University of Belgrade with a dissertation on income inequality in Yugoslavia, pioneering the approach of using microdata from household surveys. He went on to lead the research department of the World Bank, for which he wrote some 40 publications. Milanovic delivered the University of Groningen's Maddison Lecture in Economic Growth and Development, on the topic Rewriting history: global inequality since 1820.
Celebrating Angus Maddison
The Maddison Chair is part of efforts to celebrate and further the legacy of Angus Maddison. The work of the former Groningen professor whose work in global economics is carried on by the Groningen Growth and Development Centre, which traces comparative analysis of economic performance over time and across countries,such as in the Penn World Table tables coordinated by Professor Robert Inklaar.
Maddison was educated at Cambridge, McGill and Johns Hopkins, and began his career at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Appointed as a professor in Groningen in 1978, Maddison published about 20 books, tracing the history of economic developments back as far as classical times. His contribution to economics has had a deep impact, illustrated by some 1,300 citations received by his 1987 paper Growth and Slowdown in Advanced Capitalist Economicsin the Journal of Economic Literature.
| Last modified: | 23 September 2024 09.35 a.m. |