Branko Milanovic has written an outstanding book. Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization is informative, wide-ranging, scholarly, imaginative and commend-ably brief. As you would expect from one of the world’s leading experts on this topic, Milanovic has added significantly to important recent works by Thomas Piketty, Anthony Atkinson and Fran?ois Bourguignon.

Compared with Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), Milanovic focuses more on global than on national inequality, and also more on income than on wealth. His canvas is broader than that of Atkinson in In-equality: What Can Be Done? (2015), which concentrates on the UK and goes deeper into policy. The book closest to Global Inequality is Bourguignon’s The Globalisation of Inequality (2015) — unsurprisingly, perhaps, given that the two authors were colleagues at the World Bank. Yet Milanovic’s approach is both more historical and more political.

Milanovic, like Bourguignon, stresses one encouraging fact. While inequality is rising within most countries, notably the high-income ones, global inequality of incomes, though huge, has been falling, particularly since 2000. Yet even that might not continue, once China’s incomes per head rise above the global average, as will soon happen. Prospects for further reductions in global inequality will then depend on the rate of progress in other large developing economies, notably India.