Milanovic on Global Inequality and Poverty
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12034 |
| Author | Michele Bocchiola |
| Published date | 01 May 2013 |
| Date | 01 May 2013 |
Milanovic on Global Inequality and Poverty
Michele Bocchiola
Research Fellow, Libera Universita Internazionale degli Studi Sociali (LUISS), Rome
In ‘Global Income Inequality in Numbers: in History
and Now’,
1
Branko Milanovic explains, with exceptional
clarity, the social and political relevance of income
inequality from a global perspective. In this short
commentary, I will try to express some of the bafflement
that Milanovic’s view might generate at a closer look.
The focus of this article is the political-philosophical view
he advances.
From Milanovic’s perspective, a full appreciation of glo-
bal inequality’s moral relevance requires one to look at
the phenomenon across all real citizens of the world as if
they were members of one country. In this way, the
world will appear an ‘extremely unequal place and the
main cause of inequality will become manifest immedi-
ately: More than 2/3 of total inequality is due to location’.
Milanovic argues that because ‘the main determinant of
one’s income is now location’and ‘the poor in poor
countries are much poorer than the poor in rich coun-
tries’, the only choice for poor people to gain a better life
is to migrate.
To resolve the issue of migration, Milanovic claims that
‘either poor countries will become richer, or poor people
will move to rich countries’. Milanovic’s view might be
problematic for reasons I shall illustrate in the next sec-
tion.
My first puzzlement concerns Milanovic’s overall view
and, in particular, his target: inequality or poverty? The
relative or absolute level of the goods and resources
available to individuals? Milanovic’s focus is on ‘income’
inequality, but he talks about poverty throughout his arti-
cle, especially when he considers the reasons why poor
people have to migrate.
Milanovic, for instance, affirms that ‘in Albania, about
30 per cent of the population have incomes that are
below the poverty threshold of Italy; obviously these
people, even if they were to become the poorest people
in Italy after migration, would still improve their real
income’. Although it seems true, it is still unclear whether
a better income in Italy will improve the life of Albanians
living there. They would still continue to be poor
because the cost of living in Italy is higher and fulfilling
their basic needs would be more expensive than in Alba-
nia. Of course, things will be different for people moving
from absolute poverty (risk of starvation, for instance) to
severe poverty (enough income for food and shelter, but
nothing else). In this case, any increase in their income
will constitute a significant change. These two cases
should not be conflated. We know that poverty matters
but it is not always clear when and how inequality does,
at least from Milanovic’s perspective.
A second puzzle concerns Milanovic’s solution to the
issue of global inequality. It could be argued that to
introduce some sort of global distributive scheme to
make poor countries richer might completely disregard
governments’and societies’political choices. Consider,
for instance, Rawls’example of ‘two liberal …countries
[that] are at the same level of wealth …and have the
same size population. [While] the first decides to industri-
alise …the second does not …preferring [a calmer life-
style]. Some decades later, the first country is twice as
wealthy as the second’. According to Rawls, ‘assuming …
that both societies are liberal …and their peoples free
and responsible, and able to make their own decisions,’
the industrialising country should not be taxed to give
subsidies to the other (Rawls, 1999, p. 126). By taking
into consideration (legitimate) governments’responsibil-
ity for the choice they make, and excluding natural disas-
ters or other cases where humanitarian intervention is
morally required, evaluating inequality ‘across all citizens
of the world as if they were members of one country’
and introducing a global redistributive scheme upon
such evaluation could be unjustified.
The last question concerns the analogy drawn
between people born in rich (or poor) families and peo-
ple born in rich (or poor) countries. Milanovic seems to
suggest that like societies ought to limit ‘inherited advan-
tages …by taxing wealth’and that by making certain
goods available (i.e. education and health care), some-
thing similar could be achieved at the global level. The
underlying idea is that because ‘most of global inequality
is due to differences in location …we [can] treat loca-
tion, and thus citizenship, as a rent’. Based on this, it
may not be clearly evident whether this is actually the
case, at either a local or global level.
First, I wonder whether limiting the ‘inherited advanta-
ges’of rich families could efficaciously reduce inequality.
If we take away half of a very rich person’s wealth part
of this could surely relieve some poverty in the short
term, but the gap between rich persons and the rest of
the people (namely the level of inequality) might remain
Global Policy (2013) 4:2 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12034 ©2013 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 4 . Issue 2 . May 2013 209
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