"Citizenship has acquired an enormous economic value"

Branko Milanović

Said Branko Milanović, in a blogpost titled "Is citizenship just a form of rent?" 

Branko Milanović is a visiting presidential professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a senior scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-economic Inequality.

In a globalised world, composed of countries with vastly unequal mean incomes, citizenship has acquired an enormous economic value, argues Milanović. 

"The existence of the welfare state in a world of enormous income differences between the countries has drawn a wedge between citizens of rich countries that enjoy these benefits and citizens of poor countries that do not. It has created a “citizenship rent” for those who are lucky to be citizens of the rich countries; and “citizenship penalty” for others. Two otherwise  identical citizens of France and Mali will have entirely different sets of income-generating rights which stem from their citizenships alone."

Prof. Milanovic continues: "Our French and Malian citizens can be equally educated, experienced, and hard-working, but their wages will differ by a factor of 5 to 1, or even more, simply because one of them works in a rich and another in a poor country. In fact, around 60% of our lifetime incomes is determined by country of citizenship."

Prof. Milanovic’s paper "Global Inequality of Opportunity: How Much of Our Income Is Determined by Where We Live?" was published in May 2015 in the Review of Economics and Statistics (vol. 97, no. 2. pp. 452-460). The author has provided the above link for those who wish to read this paper.