Roberto Scazzieri

Roberto Scazzieri is Alma Mater Professor of Economic Analysis at the University of Bologna and a National Fellow of the National Lincei Academy, Rome. He is a Senior Member of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He is also a Visiting Fellow of the Structural Economic Analysis Unit, Goldsmiths University of London, a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Financial History, University of Cambridge, and a Member of the Babbage Policy Network, Institute for Manufacturing, University of Cambridge. He has been “Professore Distaccato” at the Centro Linceo Interdisciplinare ‘Beniamino Segre’ of the National Lincei Academy for the period 2012-2015. He was the founding Scientific Director of the Institute for Advanced Study of the University of Bologna.

His primary areas of interest are the economic theory of production and structural economic dynamics. His research has led him to investigate foundational aspects of production theory, and in particular production structures considered as patterns of interdependence between production flows, productive capacities, and tasks. He has applied this theoretical framework to the analysis of the relationships between structure and scale of production, and to the investigation of the relationship between structural specification and economic dynamics. In this field he has published A Theory of Production. Tasks, Processes and Technical Practices (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993), and has edited Dinamica economica strutturale (Bologna, Il Mulino, 1990), in collaboration with A. Quadrio Curzio, The Economic Theory of Structure and Change (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990), in collaboration with M.Baranzini, Production and Economic Dynamics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 1996), in collaboration with M. A. Landesmann, The Economics of Structural Change, 3 volumes (Cheltenham and Northampton, E. Elgar, 2003), in collaboration with H. Hagemann and M.A. Landesmann, Resources, Production and Structural Dynamics (Cambridge, University Press, 2015), in collaboration with Mauro Baranzini and Claudia Rotondi. He also has a long standing interest in the history of economic analysis in its connection with the history of economic structures, and in the philosophy of economic analysis. In these fields he published the volume Sui momenti costitutivi dell’economia politica (Bologna, Il Mulino, 1983), in collaboration with A. Quadrio Curzio. He has also co-edited, with A. Quadrio Curzio, the book series Protagonisti del Pensiero Economico, 4 volumes (Bologna, Il Mulino, 1977-1982), with M.C. Galavotti and P. Suppes, Reasoning, Rationality and Probability, Stanford, CSLI Publications, 2007, and with Pier Luigi Porta, L’Illuminismo delle riforme civili (Milano, Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere, 2014).

His current work at Bologna and Cambridge and at the National Lincei Academy explores key concepts of structural economic analysis such as the criterion of relative structural invariance, the possibility of alternative specifications of economic structure, and the implications of structural analysis for political economy studies. In the latter field he published The Political Economy of the Eurozone, edited in collaboration with D’Maris Coffman and Ivano Cardinale (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He also co-edited with Ivano Cardinale The Palgrave Handbook of Political Economy published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. His research monograph The Constitution of Political Economy, co-authored with Adrian Pabst, was published with Cambridge University Press in 2023. The research monograph Positional Political Economy, co-authored with Ivano Cardinale, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.