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Past Event

Italy and the World Economy

December 5, 2011
5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
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In celebration of the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy

In celebration of the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy, The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University, and Banca d’Italia present a Symposium on Italy and the World Economy. Opening remarks from Gianni Toniolo (Professor of Economics) will be followed by a panel discussion with Nobel Prize winner, Edmund Phelps (Professor of Economics), Charles Sabel (Professor of Law and Social Sciences) and Nadia Urbinati (Professor of Political Theory and Hellenic Studies). The event will conclude with a closing statement by Fabrizio Saccomanni (Director General, Banca d’Italia).
The symposium’s topics are selected from the papers presented at the international conference celebrating 150 years of Italy’s unification, which was held at Banca d’Italia’s Rome headquarters on October 12-15, 2011. Papers may be viewed by accessing the following link: http://www.bancaditalia.it/studiricerche/convegni/atti/storico-internazi...

Edmund S. Phelps, the 2006 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, is the founding director of the Center on Capitalism and Society. He was born in 1933 near Chicago, received his B.A. from Amherst in 1955 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1959. After appointments at Yale and Penn he joined Columbia in 1971. In 2008 he was named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, received the Premio Pico della Mirandola, the Kiel Global Economy Prize, and was honored by establishment of the Phelps Chair at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, which two years later, also instituted the Phelps medal for innovation and inclusion. In 2010 Phelps was appointed Dean of the New Huadu Business School and named to the Advisory Board of the New York Forum. In 2011 he became director of the New Huadu Economics and Management Institute in Beijing and was given the Louise Blouin Award for Creative Leadership. He has received many honorary degrees, the latest being a doctorate degree from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in June 2010.

Charles F. Sabel is the Maurice T. Moore Professor of Law and Social Science at Columbia Law School, a post he has held since 1995. He was formerly the Ford International Professor of Social Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His publications include Learning by Monitoring (2006, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), A Constitution of Democratic Experimentalism (with Michael C. Dorf, 2006, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), Can We Put an End to Sweatshops?: A New Democracy Forum on Raising Global Labor Standards (with Archon Fung and Dara O'Rourke, 2001, Beacon Press), Experimentalist Governance in the European Union, Towards a New Architecture (with Jonathan Zeitlin, 2010, Oxford University Press), Worlds of Possibility (ed. with Jonathan Zeitlin, 1997, Cambridge University Press), Ireland: Local Partnerships and Social Innovation (with the LEED Programme of the OECD, 1996), The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (with Michael Piore, 1984, Basic Books), Work and Politics: The Division of Labor in Industry (1982, Cambridge University Press), and numerous articles on economics and social organization. 

Fabrizio Saccomanni has been Director General of the Bank of Italy since 2006. He is a member of the Directorate of the Bank of Italy, a member of the Board of Directors of the Bank for International Settlements (Basel) and Alternate to the Governor in the Governing Council of the European Central Bank (Frankfurt). After obtaining a degree in Economics from the Bocconi University in Milan, he attended postgraduate courses in monetary and international economics at Princeton University. He joined the staff of the Bank of Italy in 1967. From 1970 to 1975 he was seconded to the International Monetary Fund (Washington). Upon returning to the Bank of Italy, he was assigned to the Research Department. In 1984 he was appointed head of the Foreign Department and in 1997 managing director for International Affairs. From February 2003 to September 2006 he was Vice President of the EBRD (London).

Gianni Toniolo is Research Professor of Economics and History at Duke University, and Professor of economic history at the Libera Università delle Scienze Sociali (Roma). He is Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London), member of the European Academy and co-editor of Rivista di Storia Economica.
Previously Professor of Economics at the Universities of Roma Tor Vergata and Ca’Foscari, the University of Venice, he was visiting professor at the universities of Connecticut, California at Berkeley, and Hitotsubashi (Tokyo), and a visiting fellow at St. Antony’s College and All Souls College, Oxford. His books in English include : The World Economy Between the Wars, Oxford University Press 2008 (with C. H. Feinstein e P. Temin), The Global Economy in the 1990s. A long-run perspective, Cambridge University Press, 2006 (with Paul Rhode), Central bank cooperation at the Bank for International Settlements, Cambridge University Press 2005, Economic Growth in Europe Since 1945, Cambridge University Press, 1996 (with N. Crafts), An Economic History of Liberal Italy, Routledge 1990.

Nadia Urbinati (Ph.D., European University Institute, Florence, 1989) is Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory and Hellenic Studies in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University and teaches also at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna of Pisa. She is the authors of several essays on Italian political thought and Antonio Gramsci's in particular. Her most recent books are Liberi e uguali: Contro l'ideologia individualista (Laterza 2011) and Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (Chicago 2008). She co-edited several books, and most recently the Cambridge edition of Condorcet's Political Writings with Steven Lukes (forthcoming 2011). In 2009 she received the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award and in 2008 the President of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, named her Commendatore della Repubblica (Commander of the Italian Republic).