1. Introduction: Luigi L. Pasinetti—A Leading Scholar of the Second Generation of the Cambridge School of Keynesian Economics

Baranzini and Harcourt (1993, p. 2) have defined him as the ‘Senior heir of the Cambridge Post-Keynesian School of Economics’ and Harcourt (2012, p. 137) has defined him as ‘the last of the great System-Builders’.

Geoff Harcourt entered King’s College, Cambridge, in September 1955, while Luigi Pasinetti arrived at Gonville and Caius in September 1956, just few yards away. Harcourt’s own biography is given in Harcourt (1999) and in many other papers. The first author of this volume has a long-taped version of it, taped over many years.

Harcourt (2006, p. 1). The whole passage of G. C. Harcourt reads as follows:

Maynard Keynes, Richard Kahn, Richard Goodwin, Nicholas Kaldor, Luigi Pasinetti, Joan Robinson and Piero Sraffa all started initially, at least in some degree, within the mainstream of their time. They all moved well and truly outside it, attempting to create either a revolutionary alternative or to rehabilitate the classical-Marxian tradition, in most cases in the light of the Keynesian revolution. (Harcourt 2006, p. 1)

See, for instance, Cohen and Harcourt (2003), or Pasinetti’s ‘Lezione inaugurale, Accademia dei Lincei’, May 2010.

This definition has been used by Professor Sir Robin Matthews when he spoke at Sir John Hicks’s official commemoration. On this point see also Scazzieri and Zamagni (2008, p. 4). See also Matthews (2004), quoted in Scazzieri et al. (2008, p. 423).

This point has been developed in Baranzini and Harcourt (1993, p. 6).

The first author of this volume remembers discussing the general longevity of economics scholars with Professor James A. Mirrlees when the news of the premature death at 49 of the Cambridge economist Michael James Farrell (1926–75), Fellow of Gonville and Caius College and Reader in Economics in the University, reached Oxford. As far as longevity is concerned, we might also quote Pasinetti’s fellow member of the Lincei Academy of Rome, Rita Levi Montalcini (born April 22, 1909, who died on December 30, 2012, aged 103).

Alberto Quadrio Curzio was a research student at St. John’s College, Cambridge, from September 1962 to September 1963. Ever since he has been intensely associated with Cambridge; first with Robin Matthews and Luigi Pasinetti and, later on, especially with John Eatwell. For the academic year 2010–11 he was elected Distinguished Academic Visitor at Queens’ College, Cambridge; invited as Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Financial Analysis & Policy, Judge Business School; and elected Member of the Advisory Board of the Centre for Financial History of the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of Academia Europaea and other scientific institutions. In 2015, he was elected President of the Lincei Academy in Rome. He is the founder and editor-in-chief since 1984 of Economia Politica, Journal of Analytical and Institutional Economics, now co-published by Il Mulino and Springer. Quadrio Curzio has contributed to Cambridge School of Economics in a ‘dual’ role. The first was devoted to preserving the relevance of such an approach in Italian research and academic institutions. His aim was also to extend this approach to the political and social fields as well. The second contribution of Quadrio Curzio is represented by his scientific research programme with respect to the following analytical domains: scarce resources, income and wealth in a structural perspective; the process of accumulation, multi-sectoral links and technological scarcity within structural dynamics; raw commodities, industrial markets and the long-term evolution of economics systems. He has hence followed the path traced by economists in the structural tradition such as Thomas Roberto Malthus, David Ricardo, Piero Sraffa and Wassily Leontief. We may say that the research programme started since the mid-1960s by Alberto Quadrio Curzio has provided an ambitious and path-breaking analytical framework for the analysis of resource-based structural economic dynamics. In that tradition, non-produced resources play a critical role in shaping economic dynamics. The volume Resources, Production and Structural Dynamics (see Baranzini et al. 2015) has been edited in order to provide an assessment of Quadrio Curzio’s research programme and to tackle new lines of investigation.

In particular we may mention the five volumes of Protagonisti del pensiero economico, edited by Quadrio Curzio and Scazzieri (1978–83); see also Baranzini (1979), Baranzini and Scazzieri (1986) and Quadrio Curzio (1993a, b).

Since January 1975, Roberto Scazzieri has been closely associated first with the University of Oxford and since the early 1990s with the University of Cambridge. Apart from Sraffa he is probably the Italian economist who has had the most long-lasting institutional involvement with Oxbridge, besides holding since 1990 his chair of economic analysis at Bologna. He took a Laurea in Economics and Politics at Bologna with a dissertation on ‘Productivity laws and price determination’ written under the supervision of Alberto Quadrio Curzio. He was then awarded a Stringher scholarship by the Bank of Italy, and in 1975 he enrolled at Linacre College, Oxford, where for five years he worked under the supervision first of David Soskice and thereafter of Michael Bacharach on an M.Litt. thesis on ‘Scale and Efficiency in Classical and Post-Classical Models of Production’. Then he worked under the supervision of Michael Bacharach on a D.Phil. thesis. In 1993, Scazzieri published with Clarendon Press a volume with the title A Theory of Production. Tasks, processes, and Technical Practices. Scazzieri’s work fills an important gap in the existing theoretical literature on production structures. In the mid-1980s the editors of The New Palgrave. A Dictionary of Economics did ask him and Luigi Pasinetti to write one entry on ‘Structural economic dynamics’ and another on ‘Capital theory: paradoxes’. In this way, Scazzieri remains one of the very few economists to have published a joint paper with Luigi Pasinetti. In the early 1990s, he decided to move his research interests from Oxford to Cambridge, where he was first appointed Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall in 1992; Visiting Fellow at Gonville and Caius College in 1999; Visiting Fellow, Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) in 2004; Visiting Research Fellow, Centre for History and Economics, King’s College; and Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Financial History, Newnham College. In Cambridge he continued his research focusing on the economics of structural change, working primarily on a comparison between ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ models of economic structure and on the micro- and meso-foundations of structural economic dynamics in projects that have involved collaborative research with Alberto Quadrio Curzio, Luigi Pasinetti, Carlo Poni, Patrick Suppes, Richard Arena, Maria Carla Galavotti, Harald Hagemann, Prue Kerr, Michael Landesmann, Pier Luigi Porta, Antonio Andreoni, Ivano Cardinale, D’Maris Coffman, Silva Marzetti, Adrian Pabst and many others including the first author of the present volume. More recently, he has undertaken research on the role of social structures in determining the patterns of economic interdependence (and vice versa). The Hicksian contributions to economic theory have occupied Scazzieri in the conception and scientific structuring of the meeting ‘John Hicks: One Hundredth Anniversary Workshop’ held at Bologna in 2004; the papers were gathered and edited in 2008 by Roberto Scazzieri, Amartya K. Sen and Stefano Zamagni. In September 2012 Roberto Scazzieri and Michelle Baddeley (see Sect. 10.​4 below) were the convenors of a conference in honour of Luigi Pasinetti on ‘The Economics of Structural Change: Theory, Institutions and Policies’, which was sponsored by the Cambridge Political Economy Society. Roberto Scazzieri was among the founders and a managing editor of Structural Change and Economic Dynamics launched in 1990 and initially published by OUP. Issue 7.2 of this journal was dedicated to Pasinetti’s Structural Dynamics with an Introduction by Roberto Scazzieri.

Quadrio Curzio and Scazzieri’s seminal work was also well received in France: see Lutfalla (1983).

Baranzini and Scazzieri (1986, p. 46).

On this point see, for instance, Baranzini and Mirante (2016).

Pasinetti maintains that the term ‘completion of’ is better than that of ‘alternative to’ or ‘distinguished from’. The ‘vertically integrated’ and the ‘input-output’ analyses complete (and support) each other reciprocally.

On this point, see Baranzini and Quadrio Curzio (2012, Sect. 9).