President
Mario Baldassarri
Summary of my scientific career and contributions: Economic theory and empirical analysis
I started my training as an economist in 1965 at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Urbino (founded in 1506 and that time chaired by the Rector Carlo Bo), located in Ancona (now the University of Ancona), where I obtained a degree in Economics in 1969 and where I had the opportunity to take my first courses in macro and microeconomics, public finance, monetary economics, international economics, economic policy, as well as courses in calculus, financial mathematics and econometrics as instruments to be applied to both theoretical and empirical economic analysis. Among my professors, who later became my friends, were Giorgio Fuà, Franco Reviglio, Claudio Napoleoni, Paolo Pettenati and Guido Rey.
In 1972, I was admitted to the Graduate Program of the Department of Economics at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I obtained a Ph.D. in Economics in 1977 and where I had the opportunity to deepen and extend my entire range of scientific training, thanks, above all, to such teachers and friends as Franco Modigliani, Robert Solow, Paul A. Samuelson, Charles Kindlberger, Evsey Domar, Franklin Fisher, Duncan Foley, Robert Hall, Stanley Fischer and Rudiger Dornbusch.
Since those years, my interests focused on three areas and their interrelationship: economic growth, equitable income distribution and financial stability. In particular, though not exclusively, I dedicated myself to the study of the role and effects of the government budget on the economy, especially in terms of its structural impact on economic growth and the social redistribution of income. In addition, I was concerned with the interactions between income distribution and economic growth itself.
My first thesis at the University of Ancona (1969) was “The Effects of Public Expenditure in the Countries of the European Economic Community” (now the European Union).[1]
On the theoretical level, the most significant product of my study (and, essentially, the starting point of all my work and contributions for close to forty years) is my doctoral thesis at MIT entitled “Government Expenditure, Inflation and Growth” published in English in several individual articles and in Italian as a book by Il Mulino in Bologna.[2]
The central point of this theoretical analysis, which allowed me to make some important theorems, is that “the level and the composition” of public spending and “the level and composition” of tax revenue do, in fact, affect various growth paths in economic systems. Therefore, the study of the impact of the government budget on the economy cannot be limited to an assessment of the effects of financial balances alone. Stated differently, the public deficit and the accumulation of public debt have major effects on the economy, but cannot exhaust the study of how and how much fiscal policy determines the structural conditions of economic growth itself.
In fact, given a certain deficit or debt (even if the deficit and the debt were equal to “zero”), the level and composition of government expenditure and revenue “change” structural growth prospects and, therefore, consequently, those of employment and income redistribution in intra-generational, inter-generational and territorial terms.
Given this theoretical context, I produced an important theorem that “reversed” Haavelmo’s previous theorem, known as the “balanced budget theorem”. The latter, in fact, stated that an increase of the same amount of public spending and taxes (a zero deficit operation) results in an equal increase in the economy’s real income.
My contribution consists in having shown that the relationship between public intervention in the economy through fiscal policies (even at zero deficit and at a balanced budget) and the potential growth path of the economy is not “linear”. When the “level” of public spending and taxes is modest relative to GDP, a proportional increase can also raise income and employment, as proposed by Haavelmo. But this effect is not “linear” to infinity. Indeed, there is a “threshold” beyond which this effect of increased spending tied to an increase in tax revenues results in “a reduction, not an increase” in income and employment. Therefore, this relationship is “backwarding”. This effect is also dependent not only on the level of spending and revenues, but also on their composition with respect to the type of expenditures (current and investment) and the type of revenues (direct and indirect, on income and/or wealth etc).
Another of my theoretical contributions refers to the relationship between income distribution and the structural conditions of economic growth.[3] Even in this case, I demonstrated that the relationship “is not” linear.
On the one hand, if an economy is characterized by very strong distributional inequalities (few rich and many poor) it cannot have structural prospects for sustained economic growth.
On the other hand, if an economic system is perfectly “egalitarian” (all citizens have the same income) structural growth prospects are equally subdued and modest.
These two “non-linearities” in economic theory (which seem to reproduce in economics the physics principle for the electric engine that runs when two magnetic fields are neither too close nor too far away) have important consequences in every analysis, theoretical and empirical, aiming to assess the effects of the public budget and of the redistribution of income in economic systems.
These are two pillars that have guided almost all of my theoretical and empirical work through the decades.
A third successive field of research refers to the role of the accumulation of human capital (education and training) in economic growth development, also in relation to models of “endogenous” growth and the attempt to explain and measure parts of the so-called “Solow residual”, i.e. that part of economic growth that is not explained by the quantitative increase in productive factors.[4]
In this sphere, I also produced a theoretical analysis about the “optimal” model for funding education[5], particularly in relation to training in the higher stages of education (high school, undergraduate and post graduate), where it is clear that providing free courses for students paid for by the public budget can produce worse and less efficient effects when it comes to creating opportunities and selecting skills than a system where the individual pays his own fees for higher education, provided that extensive programs are introduced to support and direct subsidies to students who are deserving but are in precarious economic conditions (scholarships aimed at abating tuition fees as well as maintenance and overall student costs). When all costs are financed by the public budget, there is the risk that the benefits go to children of well-to-do families, with less-than-excellent abilities, who have reached high levels of education only because the “social perverse selection” has occurred well before: they receive their education “free, out of the public budget, and, therefore, at the expense of the taxpayer”. This is bound to lead to the exclusion of children with excellent intellectual capacity from poorer families only because these students just cannot reach higher levels of education because they have been excluded in previous phases of that perverse selection.
In the second half of the Nineties, I had the good fortune, perhaps not completely by chance, of having a brilliant student at Sapienza University of Rome who asked me to be supervisor for his graduate thesis. He wanted to study the impact caused by the effects of artificial intelligence on economic growth[6]. As a result of his excellent work in research a singular aspect arose. The growth of artificial intelligence could accelerate economic growth and, in turn, faster growth would accelerate the growth of artificial intelligence in a virtuous circle that would be self-sustaining. Thus, scientific curiosity brought me to investigate what could the limits of growth be in such a theoretical model. In other words, what happens when productivity is unlimited? This is connected to discussions on “singularity”. Technological singularity is a hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence will progress to the point of greater human intelligence. This will radically change civilization and perhaps, human nature. Since the function of such intelligence could be difficult to understand by human beings, the technological singularity is often seen as an event (similar to a gravitational singularity) beyond which the future course of human history seems unpredictable or even unfathomable. The first use of the term “singularity” in this context was by the mathematician John von Neumann. The term was popularized by the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge who believed that artificial intelligence or the brain-computer interface could be the possible causes of singularity. Those who support singularity typically propose that there will be an “explosion of intelligence”, where super intelligent beings will project successive generations of minds that are more and more powerful and might not stop growing until the cognitive capacity of the agent surpasses, by far, that of any human being. Kurzweil predicts that singularity can come about by 2045, while Vinge predicts that it will occur before 2030. In the Singularity Summit 2012, Stuart Armstrong made an analysis based on various studies of artificial generalized intelligence (AGI) and found a vast range of predictable dates, with 2040 as the average value. His forecast based on revised data is that there is a probability of 80% that singularity will occur between 2017 and 2112. Stated more simply, if production accelerates and tends to infinity, production time tends to zero. This is why the theoretical limits of economic growth is a production which travels at the speed of light. This is why even the great Einstein could be useful in theoretical speculations about economic growth models.
A few decades after my theoretical roots were planted, I tried to estimate, for several European countries including Italy, what the threshold could be beyond which further increases in public spending, even if offset by equivalent tax increases, would cause a “reduction” of potential growth and employment.
Referring to historical data of the Eighties and Nineties, the empirical threshold was found to be, for the countries analyzed, between 40 and 42% of GDP[7].
On both theoretical and empirical ground, it is clear that, if the increases in public spending would not be covered by tax revenues but by larger deficits and the accumulation of public debt, other disruptive effects on the real economy ” would be added” to those previously mentioned due to the financial imbalances caused by the public budget and the gradual accumulation of public debt. This is obviously attributable to the issue of “sustainability” of the public debt and therefore to the risk of impending serious financial crises on national and international markets.
The Solow Theorem is the cornerstone of this specific theme. Robert Solow, Nobel laureate and one of my great teachers at MIT, made it clear about fifty years ago that if the real interest rate “exceeds” the growth rate of the economy, the public debt to GDP ratio is expected to increase to infinity and the debt becomes therefore “unsustainable”.
This is, therefore, why you cannot limit yourself only to the control of financial balances of the public budget. This is exactly why, if this objective is pursued in such a shortsighted and wrong way, degrading and reducing the prospects for economic growth, the insolvency of the debt will surely continue to be a menace. In other terms, the public debt becomes “unsustainable” both when interest rates are very high and the rate of growth is structurally too low.
The Italian and European experience in recent years, in large part, is an empirical confirmation of these theoretical roots: interest rates can even be historically very low or even tend to zero, but if the growth of the economy is also zero or, even worse, below zero, the problem of public debt persists with its prospect of insolvency.
Then again, however, as I indicated earlier, the theorem that demonstrates how the “composition” as well as the “level” of public spending and taxes has a structural impact on the growth potential of an economic system implies a decisive consequence.
It is necessary to, at least, distinguish between current account expenditure and investment expenditure and, here as well, between direct and indirect taxes, between taxes which affect labor and production (wages and profits) and those that affect wealth and rent (from a dominant position on the market or misconduct such as theft and waste in public spending and tax evasion). The latter does not feed the virtuous circle of production-income-employment, but the vicious circle of (more or less legitimate) income from rent-wealth accumulation which does not reinforce the production-income cycle but leads to economic recession and depression.
For these reasons, both theoretical and empirical, a serious analysis of budgetary policies cannot be separated from their structural effects on economic growth. Problems concerning the fair distribution of income must also be assessed in the light of their impact on long run growth conditions.
In summary, the sacred goals of financial rigor, economic growth and distributive equity must be pursued jointly and alongside one another. The effects of their interaction cannot be neglected. This is solid economic policy which is supported by solid economic theory and is based on transparent and documented empirical experience.
These elements have led me through the years to analyses and economic policy proposals regarding the process of globalization in the world economy[8], the construction of the United States of Europe and the conditions which characterized and characterize the Italian economy.
With reference to the European economy[9], based on those theorems and empirical evidence, one can fully understand that the rules of the Maastricht Treaty, which could have had retaliatory implications at the time of the formation of the European Union and the Monetary Union, have become increasingly “stupid” as many influential people, who are decidedly pro-Europe, have indicated over the last few years.
To fully understand these considerations we can refer, on the one hand, to a country that respects the famous constraint of a 3% deficit with a level of public spending and taxes which are respectively, 90% and 87% of GDP and, on the other hand, a country that always respects the 3% constraint but with a level of public spending and tax revenues of 40 % and 37% of GDP. It is clear that the prospects for structural growth in these two economies are quite different and therefore, the guarantee of a pseudo financial balance is extremely fragile or non-existent in the medium-to-long term. Moreover, this is true even if the two countries had deficits and debt equal to “zero”.
Hence, this is my proposal for a Maastricht 2, i.e. a new treaty ” less stupid and far more rigorous ” than Maastricht 1. It’s sufficient to introduce in public budgets the well-known “leverage rule”, the rule which for centuries has guided the virtuous behavior of households and enterprises.
In fact, when a family decides to buy a house (investment expenditure), they try to first save a part of the total cost (30-40%) and with that down payment buy the house by obtaining a mortgage for 60-70% of the value of the home (leverage 1 to 2). If they had to wait to accumulate all the resources to make the payment 100% in cash, perhaps they would need a lifetime to do so and would never buy a house.
When a company owner decides to buy new machinery or build a new plant, he tries to, in part, finance the cost with earlier profits and, for the rest, he asks for a bank loan. If he were to pay cash for the machinery and the plant he probably could never make the investment. Likewise, it is obvious that if the family were to ask for a 100% mortgage for the house and the company owner 100% for his investment, no wise banker would be available for such funding. Here, the reference to the American cases of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the financial follies which contributed to ignite the financial crisis in recent years is clear.
It would also be crazy to claim that families and businesses need to finance 100% of their investments and pay all in cash with no access to the credit system and medium-to-long term indebtedness.
In the first case, the economy “explodes ” as we have seen in recent years.
In the second case, the economy “implodes” as we are now seeing in Italy and in Europe.
Therefore a Maastricht 2 is required: each State must have a current account surplus (and this is a greater rigor requirement than in Maastricht 1) and for each 1% of GDP of current surplus, investments can be allowed, for example, for 4% of GDP. A country in this situation would have a deficit of 3% of GDP, but this condition would be vastly more dynamic and robust than that of a country with a 3% deficit all due to current expenditure and of one with a “zero” deficit which is, however, associated with “zero” investments.
From all this the obvious absurdity also arises by which the total dichotomy between budget policy and monetary policy has been introduced in Europe, giving the European Central Bank, by statute, the unique objective of containing inflation below 2%, regardless of any development in the real economy.
Here, it’s useful to recall the “arithmetic calculation” with which the 3% limit on the public deficit was fixed.
In Europe, during those years, the “average European” ratio between public debt and GDP was equal to 60%. The average long-run European growth rate was estimated at 3%. The inflation target was set at 2%. Therefore, under these abstract conditions, nominal GDP would have grown by 5% per year (3% real +2% inflation). Thus, in order to ensure the stability at the 60% debt/GDP ratio, it would have been enough to put the deficit constraint at 3%. In fact, 60% multiplied by 5% leads to….. 3%!
Then it was said that the ECB had to contain inflation below 2% and that national governments would have to pursue a 3% growth rate, respecting Maastricht 1!
However, two individuals with only one functioning eye (ECB and Maastricht 1) are not equal to one healthy individual with two eyes who has 20/20 vision.
In reference to the Italian economy and society, those theorems and those empirical findings have led me in the years to produce and formulate various analyses and proposals for economic policy and structural interventions[10].
In the mid-Seventies, after returning from the U.S. where I had the good fortune to meet eminent teachers of economics as well as friends and Italian colleagues including Ezio Tarantelli and Mario Draghi, I also had the good fortune to meet, thanks to Giancarlo Mazzocchi, Romano Prodi and Nino Andreatta, a group of fellow economists at the Catholic University of Milan and, above all at the University of Bologna where I taught for about fourteen years. I then moved to the Sapienza University of Rome, where I taught and worked in teaching and research from 1988 until 2001. These various experiences have greatly contributed to creating a profitable environment for scientific research and empirical analysis which determined an exchange of ideas and proposals, largely related to the conditions of the Italian economy. I had the opportunity to produce a large amount of monographs and scientific articles.
Here, however, I will limit myself to a specific area of scientific effort and empirical analysis, which is also meant to be a tribute to a teacher-friend who passed away too soon. His insight and wisdom would be greatly welcome in these difficult years.
In 1978, while the introduction in Italy of a financial law (the L.468/78) was being debated in a budget session in the Parliament, at the Arel, I began to plan, along with Nino Andreatta, three big “battles” which I dare now call “civil”.
These three “battles” proposed three “targets”:- The budget auditing and certification of all Italian public administrations (state, regions, municipalities, provinces, various public entities) designed to give “transparency and certainty” to the public accounts as well as clear responsibilities at the various levels of government.
- – The introduction in the Constitution of a “budget constraint”, understood not simply as a limit on the public deficit, which would have resulted in a kind of “license to spend and tax ” and thus almost surely led to increases in current expenditure offset by reductions in investment or, worse still, by tax increases. In fact, the public budget is expressed by a simple equation that is deficit= spending – taxes. This equation has three variables and therefore a “true restriction” must fix at least two of them: the deficit must be associated to either an expenditure cap or a tax ceiling[11].
- – The establishment of a Parliamentary Budget Office, modeled on the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, which would represent an independent Authority referring directly to Parliament. It would have the task of providing economic policy decision-makers with analyses aimed at an exact quantification of economic and financial policies deriving from the different laws or proposals and assessing their effects on the economy as well as the feed-back effects that the economic outcomes of those policies would have on the budget itself. In particular, with regard to this latter issue, Nino Andreatta organized at the Arel in Rome (the Agency for Economic and Legislative Research), a series of seminars and meetings where he invited, among others, the Director of the American CBO who illustrated the role and functions of that institution and the ZBB method (Zero Base Budgeting). This procedure, at least, required an evaluation of the economic policy decisions in terms of greater or lesser expenditures and revenues compared to past historical data and not with respect to the expected values of future trends, as it was done then and it is still done today in Italy (with the result that spending cuts based on future forecasts determine increases in spending with respect to the previous year).
In 1978, these three battles were “lost”.
In the following decades and even more in recent years, we all have suffered (and are still suffering today) the consequences of that defeat:
– in terms of the lack of certainty and transparency of public accounts (just think of the consolidation of regional, provincial and municipal budgets with data that are extremely heterogeneous with one another and with information that arrives with years of delay);
– in terms of a constraint “only” on the deficit recently introduced in the Constitution (with an almost unanimous parliamentary vote, with very few exceptions including myself) that clearly and effectively determined and maintains the vicious circle of not controlling current account expenditure, reducing investments and increasing taxes in order to contain the public deficit itself. The result of which is to reduce growth and employment and, thus, leave the deficit in the same precarious and fragile conditions. The “historical” data, at least since 2000, demonstrate all this regardless of the governments which have been in place over the years;
– in terms of economic and financial quantification of the various laws spread among too many entities and with no full and independent responsibility: Mef (the Economy and Finance Ministry), RGS (the general accounting office), Istat (the Italian National Institute of Statistics), the Bank of Italy and the Court of Auditors. The effects of economic policies on the economy are not evaluated or are evaluated in a discretionary and absolutely non-transparent manner on the part of the RGS and the MEF, which continue to persist in “static accounting” assessments without considering the interaction between economic policy, economic outcome as effect of that policy and the feedback effect of that outcome on the budget items.
Under these conditions the Parliament and most of the members of the government are therefore “dependent” on the autocratic assessments that come from the MEF and the General Accounting Office.
Numerous interventions and proposals have been made on this specific decades-long “commitment” in the institutional seat of the Senate that are verifiable in the Commission and Parliament official reports.
Thanks to these, Italy finally created the Parliamentary Office of the Budget (UPC) with Law 243 in December 24, 2012. It should start operating at the beginning of 2014. After 35 years of lost battles waged together with Nino Andreatta and a few others, this opportunity to give the country and especially the Parliament and politics the “certainty of knowledge” and the “responsibility for a conscious decision” cannot be wasted.
As Luigi Einaudi used to say, “we must know in order to decide.”
In order to complete this brief description of my scientific background, I want to point out, almost out of context, two further aspects of my commitment.
The first is my theoretical timely contribution in reference to the concentrated oligopoly theory applied to the world drug market[12] which shows that drug prohibition leads to the formation of huge profit margins which feed the illegal market strengthening its direct control by powerful international criminal organizations, with the consequent actions of polluting and strengthening other illegal markets such as arms and prostitution and legal markets such as money laundering in areas of normal economic activity. Consequently, on theoretical grounds, legalization represents the most effective fight against crime and the spread of drugs.
The second, much more important commitment, is the result of my valuable and essential collaboration with friend and fellow economist Pierluigi Ciocca[13]. We have gathered the major contributions to economic theory and empirical evidence that important Italian economists made between the nineteenth and the twentieth century, from Ferrara in 1854 to Einaudi in 1944. These contributions, known to the Italian academic community but, for linguistic reasons, less well-known in the rest of the world were published for the first time in English, in three volumes to which, not accidentally, we gave the title Roots of the Italian School of Economics and Finance.
This important collection of essays was preceded by my personal, scientific, cultural and territorial interests strongly influenced by Maffeo Pantaleoni[14], who for years had taught Public Finance at the University of Macerata, the city where I was born and where I found myself playing football as primary school student in the garden of the Pantaleoni house in Via della Vergini. Only later was I able to understand what the great Maffeo Pantaleoni had thought and written probably within the walls of that house or in his studio, where, once, a badly kicked ball shattered one of the windows. Fortunately for us, the house had been uninhabited for decades.
Last, but first in my mind and heart, I want to salute two great teachers, not surprisingly, friends of each other, who I had the good fortune to meet at the University of Ancona, Giorgio Fuà, and at MIT, Franco Modigliani. Without them I could never have become an economist and could never have written the previous pages in which I summarized my scientific career.
On 13 September 2000, when Giorgio Fuà passed away, I was editor of the Rivista di Politica Economica (Journal of Economic Policy) and asked my friend and colleague Alberto Niccoli, his pupil and colleague, to write an essay in memory of Giorgio Fuà. Then I asked Lorenzo Fuà to let me have a photo of his father. I published everything in the review that I edited during that period[15].
At the time of the death of my great teacher in science and life, Franco Modigliani, I wrote out, in one go, a “memorial made up of memories “.
We met for the first time at the University of Ancona in 1968. He was already the well-known Franco Modigliani and was working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, along with Albert Ando, on the construction of the first large-scale econometric model of the U.S. economy. It was called MPS (MIT-Penn-Social Science). He accepted the invitation of his friend Giorgio Fuà to come to Ancona for three days and explain large-model econometrics to the students, the economic analysis expressed by behavioral equations, the conditions of equilibrium of defined equations, the possibility of verifying theoretical models and the concrete choices of economic policy. He said to us, ”if your theories are proved wrong by empirical analysis, and therefore by reality, change your theories, don’t try to change the world by tweaking the numbers inside your theoretical equations.”
I was a third-year student in the Faculty of Economics in those days, I dreamed of going to MIT one day to get my PH.D. Of course, Franco Modigliani did not notice the young Italian who listened to each and every one of his words.
Four years later, when I was awarded the Stringher-Mortara scholarship from the Bank of Italy, I was able to fulfill that dream and made my application for the Ph.D Program at MIT. Obviously, I did not know anyone in that distant place, but the selection committee communicated the acceptance of my application to me and so it was that in September 1972 I stepped into Franco Modigliani’s office and for the first time we became acquainted. We never lost touch with each other from that time on, scientifically and humanly, until September 25, 2003, when he left us, clear-minded, present and a fighter for his ideas until the night before[16].
[1] Mario Baldassarri, Gli Effetti della Spesa Pubblica nei paesi della CEE, mimeo, Ancona 1969.
Subsequently, as a synthesis of my scientific contributions in the early seventies, See:
Mario Baldassarri, Saggi di programmazione economica e settoriale, Edizioni TC, Bologna 1973
Mario Baldassarri, I Criteri di valutazione degli investimenti, Edizioni TC, Bologna 1974
Mario Baldassarri, Note di teoria della domanda, teoria della produzione e struttura dei mercati, Edizioni TC, 1976
[2] Mario Baldassarri, Government Expenditure, Inflation and Growth, mimeo, MIT 1977; Spesa Pubblica, Inflazione e Crescita, Il Mulino, Bologna 1979.
Mario Baldassarri, Government Expenditure, Inflation and Growth in a fiscal-monetary policy model, EN-MPS,1976
Mario Baldassarri, Imperfectly Anticipated Inflation, Capital Gain Expectations and Government Investment in a Two Sector Growth Model, Economic Notes, MPS, Siena, 1979.
Mario Baldassarri, Government Expenditure, Inflation and Growth in a Two-Country Model of International Trade: who bears the burden?, Economia Internazionale, Genova 1980
Mario Baldassarri, Optimal “Mix” of Government Expenditure and Optimal Growth Path for an Open Economy within a Three Targets-Three Guns Framework, Economic Notes, Siena 1984
[3] Mario Baldassarri e Gustavo Piga, Distribution Equity and Economic Efficiency: Trade-off and Synergy, RPE, 1994
[4] Mario Baldassarri et altri, Human Capital, Allocation of Time and Endogenous Growth, AEA-AER, New Orleans 1992.
Mario Baldassarri et altri, An Attempt to Model a “Tobin-Modigliani” Approach to Saving,RPE, Roma 1990.
[5] Mario Baldassarri, Tassazione, distribuzione ed ottimalità nei programmi di sussidi all’educazione, Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali, Milano 1976.
[6] Alessandro Acquisti, “Intelligenza Artificiale e Crescita Economica: il capitale intelligente ed autoriproducente da von Neumann alla crescita endogena”, mimeo,Tesi di Laurea, Università La Sapienza, Roma1997
[7] Mario Baldassarri e Francesco Busato, How to Reach Full Employment in Europe, Palgrave-Macmillan, London 2003
Mario Baldassarri e Francesco Busato, Europa Svegliati, Sperling&Kupfer, Milano 2003.
[8] Mario Baldassarri e Pasquale Capretta, The World Economy toward Global Disequilibrium, Palgrave-Macmillan, London 2006; L’Economia Mondiale verso lo Squilibrio Globale, Sperling&Kupfer, Milano 2006
For other contributions, see:
Mario Baldassarri, Luigi Paganetto, Edmund S. Phelps, Equity, Efficiency, and Growth:the future of the welfare state, Palgrave-Macmillan, London 1996.
Mario Baldassarri, Robert Mundell, John McCallum Eds., Debt, Deficit and Economic Performance, Palgrave- Macmillan, London 1994.
Mario Baldassarri, Robert Mundell, John McCallum Eds., Global Disequilibrium in the World Economy, Palgrave-Macmillan, London 1992.
Mario Baldassarri Ed., Verso il grande crack?, SIPI, Roma 1990.
Mario Baldassarri Ed., Keynes and the Economic Policies of the 1980’s, Palgrave-Macmillan, London 1989.
[9] Mario Baldassarri e Francesco Busato, How to Reach Full Employment in Europe, Palgrave-Macmillan, London 2003.
Mario Baldassarri e Francesco Busato, Europa Svegliati, Sperling&Kupfer, Milano 2003.
For other contributions to the European economy see:
Mario Baldassarri, No free lunch, no”one”East European Economy”, RPE, Roma 1991.
Mario Baldassarri Ed., How to reduce unemployment in Europe, Palgrave-Macmillan, London 2003.
Mario Baldassarri Ed., The New Welfare: Unemployment and Social Security in Europe, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003.
Mario Baldassarri, Robert Mundell Eds, Building the New Europe, Vol. I-II, Palgrave-Macmillan, London 1993.
[10] For a summary of studies, analyses and proposals published during the past few decades, see:
Mario Baldassarri, Impatto del bilancio pubblico sulla allocazione delle risorse e sulla formazione di capacità produttive ed occupazionali, Risorse per lo sviluppo, Roma 1985
Mario Baldassarri e Gabriella Briotti, Government Budget and the Italian Economy through the 70’s and the 80’s RPE, Roma 1990
Mario Baldassarri, Franco Modigliani, The Italian Economy: the chance to build a new miracle”, RPE, Rome 1993
Mario Baldassarri, Franco Modigliani, The Italian Economy: what next?, Palgrave-MacMillan, London 1993
Mario Baldassarri, Italy’s perverse envelopping growth model between Economic Reform and political consensus: the 1992 crisi and the opportunities of 1993, RPE, Rome 1993
Mario Baldassarri, The Italian Economy: heaven or hell?, Palgrave-MacMillan, London 1994
Mario Baldassarri, Gustavo Piga, Debito Pubblico, consenso politico ed equilibrio economico-finanziario, McGraw-Hill, Milano, 1994
Franco Modigliani, Mario Baldassarri, Fabio Castiglionesi, Il Miracolo Possibile, Laterza, Bari 1996
Mario Baldassarri et altri, Il secondo Miracolo Possibile, Ed. IlSole24Ore, Milano 1999
Mario Baldassarri, Welfare State and Pensions in Italy: who benefits?, RPE, Rome 2000
Mario Baldassarri, Stato Sociale e pensioni: chi prende, chi paga?, RPE, Roma 2000
[11] Mario Baldassarri Ed., Uscire dalla crisi, Riprendere la Crescita: Come? Quando?, Ed.IlSole24Ore, Milano 2013
[12] Mario Baldassarri, Reprimere o legalizzare: la droga come mercato, Il Mulino, Bologna 1993
[13] Mario Baldassarri e Pierluigi Ciocca, eds., “Roots of the Italian School of Economics and Finance”, vol.I-II-III, Palgrave-McMillan, London 2001
[14] Mario Baldassarri, ed. “Maffeo Pantaleoni: at the Origin of the Italian School of Economics and Finance”, Palgrave-McMillan, London 1995
[15] Alberto Niccoli, Giorgio Fua: The Man, the Economist, the Teacher, RPE, in January 2001, Rome SIPI 2001
[16] Mario Baldassarri, In ricordo di Franco Modigliani: voi state andando ad est, ma la rotta è ad ovest, RPE, Roma, Settembre/Ottobre 2003