40 Facts About Luigi Pasinetti

Luigi L Pasinetti was an Italian economist of the post-Keynesian school.

Luigi Pasinetti developed the theory of structural change and economic growth, structural economic dynamics and uneven sectoral development.

Luigi Pasinetti was born on 12 September 1930 in Zanica, near Bergamo, in the north of Italy.

Luigi Pasinetti began his economics studies at Milan's Universita Cattolica, where he obtained his "laurea" degree in 1954.

When Luigi Pasinetti arrived in Cambridge as a research student, it was the proud citadel from which Keynesian economics had conquered the world.

Years later, Luigi Pasinetti, remembering Kahn in a Memorial Service held at King's College Chapel, University of Cambridge on 21 October 1989, recalled that:.

Luigi Pasinetti was Honorary President of: the International Economic Association, the European Society for the History of Economic Thought, the International Economic Association, the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy, the Italian Association for the History of Political Economy and the Italian Association for the History of Economic Thought.

Luigi Pasinetti provided valuable contributions to several major economic journals such as editorial advisor to: the Cambridge Journal of Economics, the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Kyklos, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, and PSL Quarterly Review to name a few.

Luigi Pasinetti died in Milan on 31 January 2023, at the age of 92.

In such work Luigi Pasinetti presented a very concise and elegant analysis of the basic aspects of classical economics.

Luigi Pasinetti explains that "the more constructive approach is taken of stating explicitly the assumptions needed in order to eliminate the ambiguities" in the Ricardian model, hence, the reason for the mathematical formulation.

Luigi Pasinetti supposes that the wage rate and the rate of profit are identical in both sectors thanks to free market competition.

Luigi Pasinetti was extraordinarily quick in grasping the gist of the idea and in seeing that the concession of his having fallen into a 'logical slip' led to a generalization of the post-Keynesian theory of income distribution and moreover to a new, long-run, Keynesian theory of the rate of profits.

Luigi Pasinetti implicitly assumed that the total profits only came from the capitalists and he neglected the workers.

The conclusions obtained from Luigi Pasinetti's Theorem led to a huge number of scientific works and papers, with the purpose of clarifying the nature of the Theorem and its more important implications.

Nonetheless Luigi Pasinetti joined Kaldor's critique concerning the highly restrictive assumptions made by the neoclassical economists:.

Luigi Pasinetti went on to argue that, even with the particular and unacceptable assumptions on technology, the Samuelson-Modigliani range of applicability would hardly have any practical significance.

Luigi Pasinetti entered the debate again in 1989 showing that -whether the government's budget was in deficit or surplus- the main results of the Cambridge equation hold.

Luigi Pasinetti is instructed to assume all workers alike, and to measure L in man-hours of labour; he is told something about the index-number problem involved in choosing a unit of output; and then he is hurried on to the next question, in the hope that he will forget to ask in what units C is measured.

Luigi Pasinetti proposed to solve the problem of the aggregation of capital through a new concept, the surrogate production function.

Luigi Pasinetti published a famous article in the Symposium of the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1966, which was actually an adaptation and expansion of an article that was presented to the First World Congress of the Econometric Society in Rome one year earlier.

Luigi Pasinetti set out to show that the theorem stated a year earlier by David Levhari and Paul Samuelson, which was supposed to demonstrate the impossibility of reswitching at the aggregate level, was false.

Luigi Pasinetti's other major contribution to the debate on capital theory was a 1969 paper titled "Switches of Technique and the 'Rate of Return' in Capital Theory".

The insistence of students to give these notes a more structured and compact form prompted Luigi Pasinetti to compile these lectures, enlarging them and then bringing them to the form in which the book appeared.

The English version, appeared two years later, in 1977 and maintained the character and the structure of the Italian version, although Luigi Pasinetti added some enlargements, in the form of more sections and new appendices.

Luigi Pasinetti begins Chapter I by contrasting two possible definitions of wealth:.

From this point onwards, Luigi Pasinetti develops and presents, in a terse way, a truly Classical theory of production.

The greatest theoretical achievement of the Sraffa system, Luigi Pasinetti says at the end of chapter 5, is that:.

The last two chapters are useful summaries of problems Luigi Pasinetti has dealt with extensively throughout his career.

The way in which Luigi Pasinetti introduces the dynamic behaviour of demand over time is an up-dated resumption of Engel's Law, which when generalized states that higher and higher levels of income lead to constantly changing consumption patterns.

Luigi Pasinetti argues that the main benefits of international relations are in fact not so much those that derive from trade as those that derive from the international learning process between countries.

In 1993, Luigi Pasinetti returned to the problems of structural dynamics with a beautifully compact book.

The publication of Sraffa's book Production of commodities by means of commodities in 1960 motivated Luigi Pasinetti to reflect on the importance of such a concept.

In 1973 Luigi Pasinetti published a paper, "The Notion of Vertical Integration in Economic Analysis", which would be a milestone for the development of all the analytical implications of the concept and its relation to the inter-industry theoretical schemes of Input-Output type.

Therein, Luigi Pasinetti proposes to consider Keynesian economics as an alternative paradigm to Neoclassical economics, emphasizing the contributions of the Cambridge Keynesians as well as future development lines on these issues.

Probably, Luigi Pasinetti -recognized as the heir of the Cambridge economists-, is the most suitable economist to talk about that ambience, because, as he himself acknowledges:.

The gestation period of the book, as is usual for Luigi Pasinetti's books, was long: about 15 years.

In terms of space, Sraffa is the economist treated in greatest detail by Luigi Pasinetti, dedicating to him three, quite independent biographical essays.

Book II ends with some suggestions, nine in total, which according to Luigi Pasinetti are at the heart of the "Keynesian Revolution".

Luigi Pasinetti asserts the need to rise above and go beyond Neoclassical economics through a genuine resurgence of a Classical-Keynesian paradigm, which can be rescued and strengthened and developed by the methodology that Pasinetti has pursued during the whole of his life, made explicit for the first time in his Structural Change and Economic Growth.