How have social and economic inequalities shaped the COVID-19 pandemic? How have they affected the global response? And what are the longer-term implications of the pandemic like to be? In this conversation, two renowned experts, Joan Benach and Branko Milanovic, discuss the known and still-unknown drivers of the crisis, its consequences for individual nations and the global community, and the challenges and opportunities the world is likely to encounter on the path toward a “new normal.”

Joan Benach is Senior Researcher, Director of the Health Inequalities Research Group -­ Employment Conditions Network (GREDS-­‐EMCONET), and Associate Professor of Public Health and Occupational Health in the Department of Political and Social Sciences (Section Sociology) at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain). He has appointments at the Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, US), the University of Toronto (Toronto, Canada), and the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada). Dr. Benach has a varied academic background that includes a MD, a MPH, and a degree in Preventive Medicine and Public Health in the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He studied Contemporary History in the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Methodology of Social Sciences in the University of Barcelona, Health Policy in the University of California at Berkeley (US), and obtained a PhD in Public Health (Health Policy) in the Johns Hopkins University.

Branko Milanovic is a Visiting Presidential Professor at the Graduate Center City University of New York and Senior Scholar at the Stone Center for Socio-economic Inequality. He obtained his Ph. D. in economics (1987) from the University of Belgrade with a dissertation on income inequality in Yugoslavia. He served as lead economist in the World Bank’s Research Department for almost 20 years, leaving to write his seminal book on global income inequality, Worlds Apart (2005). He was senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington (2003-2005) and has held teaching appointments at the University of Maryland (2007-2013) and at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University (1997- 2007). He was visiting professor at IBEI in 2019.