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Pasinetti on ‘Natural’ Versus ‘Institutional’ Relations: Two Conferences in His Honour

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Book cover Luigi L. Pasinetti: An Intellectual Biography

Abstract

Pasinetti has always stressed, from the early 1960s onwards, that economic relationships belong to two different categories, implying distinct methods of analysis. The first corresponds to that set of relationships that are independent of the institutional set-up, labelled as ‘natural dynamics’. The second is very much determined by the institutional framework. Pasinetti has concentrated his attention on this ‘natural dynamics’. A distinctive feature of Pasinetti’s ‘natural dynamics’ is that the determinacy of a given path of structural change is obtained by means of specific ‘equilibrium’ requirements (full-employment and full-capacity utilization), independently of the institutional set-up and thus also independently of particular behavioural and motivational features. At the end of this chapter, Baranzini and Mirante refer to two important conferences recently organized in Pasinetti’s honour.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a fuller treatment, see Porta (1998, pp. 43–60).

  2. 2.

    In Baranzini and Quadrio Curzio (2012, Sect. 6).

  3. 3.

    The topics covered a wide spectrum, ranging from classical, marginalist and Keynesian economics to the problems of general equilibrium and quantitative methods. Roberto Cippà (The Queen’s), Roberto Scazzieri (Linacre) and the first author of this volume (The Queen’s) were the convenors of the scientific meetings. The institution at which the seminars took place was no casual choice. Since 1969, The Queen’s College had sponsored the Florey European Studentship Scheme, originally planned by Lord Howard Florey, provost of the college and Nobel laureate for the therapeutical discovery of penicillin. Lord Florey’s aim was two-fold: to invigorate the College and Oxford by bringing to them the best research graduates of continental European universities, and to strengthen the ties of international co-operation in most fields of academic research. The Queen’s College in those years became a place of meeting and discussion for a number of British and continental research students, and academic visitors, and led to the publication of the volume Advances in Economic Theory, published by Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1982, and edited by the first author of this volume. Contributors were Roberto Scazzieri, Christopher J. Bliss, Roberto F. Cippà, Carlo Casarosa, Alvaro Cencini, Bernard Schmitt, Megnad Desai, Roy McCloughry, Nicholas H. Dimsdale, Mario Biagioli, Luigi L. Pasinetti, Mauro L. Baranzini, Heinrich Bortis, Pietro Balestra, Giuseppe Mazzarino and Augusto Schianchi. From the mid-1980s to the end of the 1990s The Queen’s College seminar moved to the Continent. In fact, thanks to the Swiss Science Foundation of Berne and to a number of Italian Universities, Roberto Scazzieri (Padua and Bologna), Ferdinando Meacci (Padua), Pier Luigi Porta (State University of Milan), Heinrich Bortis (Fribourg) and the first author of this chapter (Verona first and then Lugano, Switzerland) organized alternatively in Switzerland and Italy a yearly International Workshop on the ‘Wealth of Nations in Economic Theory’. A number of Oxbridge or Oxbridge-connected economists joined these intensive meetings like, for instance, Izumi Hishiyama, Francis Seton, Michael A. Landesmann, Richard Arena, Florian Fleck, Mark Perlman, Prue Kerr, Bernard Schmitt, Alvaro Cencini, Harald Hagemann, Mario Amendola, Heinrich Bortis, Gianni Vaggi, just to mention a few. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen joined a special meeting in Engelberg, Switzerland, in March 1990.

  4. 4.

    See Sect. 1.5.1, as well as Baranzini and Mirante 2016, pp. 145–9, on his many activities carried out in Cambridge.

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Baranzini, M.L., Mirante, A. (2018). Pasinetti on ‘Natural’ Versus ‘Institutional’ Relations: Two Conferences in His Honour. In: Luigi L. Pasinetti: An Intellectual Biography. Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71072-3_10

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