It is with great sorrow that we announce the passing of Luigi Pasinetti. For many of us he was a master and also a friend. Together with Pierangelo Garegnani he led the classical-Keynesian School. The void he leaves should stimulate each of us to take it upon ourselves to restore, for the younger generations, the taste for knowledge that we inherited from him.
Luigi L. Pasinetti (Zanica, 12 September 1930 – Varese, 31 January 2023) was one of the best-known and appreciated Italian economists. After graduating in Economics at Università Cattolica di Milano, he studied at Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard and received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University. In Italy, he studies with Francesco Vito and Siro Lombardini, as well as with Richard M. Goodwin, Wassily Leontief, Nicholas Kaldor, Joan Robinson, and Piero Sraffa abroad. He became a professor of Econometrics (since 1964) and then of Economic analysis (from 1981 to 1999) at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano. There he also served as Chair of the Faculty (1980-1983) and the Department of Economics (1984 to 1987). He was appointed Emeritus Professor of Università Cattolica. He has also served as President of the Società Italiana degli Economisti (1986-1989) and the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (1995-97). A member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, he has been a member of the STOREP Board of Guarantees (2003-2012) and was later appointed Honorary member of the Association.
Pasinetti is a leading figure of the modern classical and Post-Keynesian approaches to economics. His contributions are mainly theoretical and center on value, capital, income distribution, and growth and development. The main achievement of his research career is the construction of a multisector model of economic growth with technical progress. Pasinetti’s work dealt with topics inextricably entwined with issues of extreme topicality – from wage policies and employment of labor to public debt sustainability, from the role of profits to the effects of technological developments on work and how to handle them, and so on). He has been engaged, between the 60s and the 80s, in a lively dialogue with the most influential economists in the world (Franco Modigliani, Paul A. Samuelson, Robert Solow), who have always shown their esteem and consideration for his work. In recent years, he has been working on a book that gathers his writings on the theory of value, wherein commodities’ values are ultimately traced back to the human labor variously employed in their production.
Enrico Bellino
Pasinetti and the Cambridge Keynesians. Nine Methodological Issues, edited by Enrico Bellino and Sebastiano Nerozzi, will be presented in Piacenza, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Sala G. Piana, Via Emilia Parmense, 84, on February 14, 2023 (link here).
The 2023 STOREP Annual Conference in Bari (15-17 June) will host a session in honor of Luigi Pasinetti.
Below are some pictures of Luigi Pasinetti during the 2006 STOREP Conference in Lecce.
Mario Cedrini