Pierangelo Garegnani: Rebuilding Economic Theory
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13133/2037-3643/10152Keywords:
Garegnani, obituary, Classical Political Economy, capital theory debateAbstract
On 15 October 2011 the Italian economist Pierangelo Garegnani passed away. The article reviews Garegnani’s main contributions to economic theory by showing how they frequently gave raise to wide and relevant debates. The obituary highlights the salience of Garegnani’s analysis also for a critical understanding of the current economic and political events. Commentators have claimed that in making predictions about the effects of policies, the separation into analytical stages characteristic of the classical theory would be a disadvantage in comparison to the mechanics of ‘routine predictions’ permitted by the simultaneous determination of variables in neoclassical theory. Garegnani responded by pointing out that the separable analytical structure of classical theory is instead a factor of elasticity, as it involves the existence of relations falling outside the quantitative core of the theory and open to the influence of institutional aspects, which makes it possible to address the complexity of the real world better than the pre-defined applications of neoclassical general equilibrium.
JEL Codes: B32, B24, B51
References
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