Branko Milanovic Quotes

It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.

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

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

Brazil is a country that has rich people, as you have in New York City, as you have in Berlin or in London. But we also have poor people like in Bangladesh or in African suburbs.

Simply put, unsustainable debt is helping to keep too many poor countries and poor people in poverty.

America is such a great country, we have fat poor people.

The United States of America is the richest country in the world; yet we're the worst at taking care of poor people.

Foreign aid goes from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.

When we, for example, see shifts of huge production lines from certain areas to other countries, people tend to ask the question, "Where's my place in this modern world?" We have this here, this tendency in our country, we have it in other countries.

Exporters monitor economic and political policies to the developing world, but the consequences of that have been to make developing countries far more sensitive to the constant fluctuations. Developing countries are not always allowed to support their farmers in the same way as the U.S. or Europe is. They're not allowed to have tariff barriers. They're forced, more or less, to shrink their social programs. The very poorest people have fewer and fewer entitlements. The consequence of this has been that there's been a chronic increase in the vulnerability of those economies to price shocks.

One of the most abused country on earth is Mexico. The marketing spills over the border, and people are persuaded to eat food that's bad for them, more in rich countries than in poor ones. I was traveling the world. What really struck me was the way we engage with food - how it's a global phenomenon - the world becoming more and more disconnected from it.

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.

In a system of free trade and free markets poor countries - and poor people - are not poor because others are rich. Indeed, if others became less rich the poor would in all probability become still poorer.

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.

One of the richest countries in the history of the world having communities where people have to go over half an hour to get to fresh produce and food is unacceptable.

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.

People intuitively know that trade is good for our country. We just have to get the right trade agreements.

We used to be one of the richest countries in the world, but we are now on a path towards under-development. This austerity that has been imposed on the people doesn't work. The people will not allow themselves to be throttled without revolting.

People are really excited by Obama abroad because he seems to be the first American presidential candidate who has ambition to go out of the country. In a sense, with the power of globalization, you are kind of electing the leader of the Western world to an extent.

We say the United States is a rich country, but how can we be rich when millions of poor American children go to bed hungry?

Mitt Romney said he's not concerned about the very poor. What he means is people making less than a million.

...poor people are just as human as anyone else. They have just as much potential as anyone.

We often confuse or loosely use the ideas of crony capitalism or neoliberalism to actually avoid using the word "capitalism", but once you've actually seen, let's say, what's happening in India and the United States - that this model of US economics packaged in a carton that says "democracy" is being forced on countries all over the world, militarily if necessary, has in the United States itself resulted in 400 of the richest people owning wealth equivalent [to that] of half of the population.

The most dreadful thing of all is that many millions of people in the poor countries are going to starve to death before our eyes. We shall see them doing so upon our television sets.

In a foreign country people don't expect you to be just like them, but in Los Angeles, which is infiltrating the world, they don't consider that you might be different because they don't recognize any values except their own. And soon there may not be any others.