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Mario Arcelli’s selected papers on economics (1967-1977) Edited by Federico Arcelli Foreword by Giorgio di Giorgio 2004 Federico Arcelli Giorgio Di Giorgio Appunti Europei Mario Arcelli’s selected papers on economics (1967-1977) FOREWORD ................................................................................................................................................. 3 MARIO ARCELLI: A LIFE FOR ECONOMICS ................................................................................................. 4 CHAPTER I TECHNOLOGY AND CAUSALITY ............................................................................................. 7 Foreword ................................................................................................................................................ 8 Causal order and dependencies in linear economic structures .............................................................. 9 Quality Changes in Factors and Decomposition of Technical Progress in Aggregate Production Functions ............................................................................................................................................ 21 CHAPTER II NEOCLASSICAL AND KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS .................................................................. 40 Foreword .............................................................................................................................................. 41 Information Structure in the Walrasian Theory of General Economic Equilibrium and in the Keynesian Model ............................................................................................................................... 42 Keynesian Theory and Neo-Quantity Analysis: towards a Synthesis ................................................. 49 CHAPTER III MONEY AND THE BALANCE OF PAYMENTS ...................................................................... 62 Foreword .............................................................................................................................................. 63 Some thoughts on the foundations of Money ..................................................................................... 64 Some issues on application of control theory to balance of payments adjustment: a new treatment opposed to the accepted theory ........................................................................................................... 76 Federico Arcelli Giorgio Di Giorgio FOREWORD (nota introduttiva da fare – lasciare due pagine) Federico Arcelli Giorgio Di Giorgio MARIO ARCELLI: A LIFE FOR ECONOMICS As a professor of economics, Mario Arcelli has been indeed, since his very early teaching years, in his favourite environment. The strong bond with the academic world represents the key to understand a whole life of research efforts joined to several important achievements as civil servant and in the business community. In fact, when we look to all the public appointment he got, as well as all the positions that he held in corporate boards, we discover that those were always a part-time commitments for him, and the only real continuing activity has been university. Mario Arcelli was descendant of an old Northern Italian family, originated from the town of Piacenza. He was indeed born in Milan on May 21st, 1935. He got married in 1967 with Maria Gabriella Legrenzi and they had two sons. His bond with economic studies started with the degree he got in 1957 from Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi – Milan, being awarded of top marks and distinction. In the following years he was assistant researcher in the same university, starting a long track of publications with some articles for a review promoted by Assolombarda; at the same time he was involved in research and consulting projects in collaboration with several banking and industry groups based in Milan. In 1963 he got the first step in the academic “cursus honorum” being appointed “libero docente”, a more stable professor role, at the University of Trieste, and few years later, in 1967, being only 32, he became full professor in Economics in the same university. In the same period his scientific works were published on several reviews in Italian, English and French. In particular he was author of some “selected papers” for the Review of Economic Politics, and for Quality and Quantity; in Italian he wrote several articles for the “Rivista di Politica Economica”, for “Economia Internazionale delle Fonti di Energia”, for the “Giornale degli economisti e annali di economia”, and, mainly, for “L’Industria” and “Il Risparmio”. From 1969 to 1973 he took the chair of Economics at the Università di Padua, quitting that place for a one- year visiting period at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) of Boston (USA), where he met Paul Samuelson, Kenneth Arrows and Franco Modigliani, with whom he maintained contacts in the following years. In 1974 he became full professor of economics at the Università “La Sapienza” of Rome, where he served for about fifteen years, until 1989, and directed the Department of Economics between late Seventies and early Eighties. Being in Rome, he joined several editorial committees and, since 1979, he took the position of editor of “Economia Italiana” and its English homologue, the “Review of Economic Conditions”. He maintained both this position until his death in 2004. At the same time Mario Arcelli was regularly writing on some Italian reviews (among others “Bancaria”, “Banche e Banchieri” and “Rivista di Politica Economica”) and he was columnist, as economic expert, for Rome’s newspaper “Il Tempo”, between 1974 and 1986. Since 1986 and up to 1997 he was columnist for “Il Messaggero”. Between the late Seventies and early Eighties Arcelli was member of several government committees, and acted as advisor of the Banca d’Italia, the Italian Central Bank. He also was member of the scientific advising committee of Confindustria, the association between Italian industrialists. Two of those committees were of particular importance: the so-called “comitato Spaventa” (after the name of its chairman) on the conditions of public debt in Italy and the “Comitato Tecnico Scientifico” of the ministry of Budget and Economic Planning, that was the main consultive body for economic matters within Italian government. Of this latter he got his first appointment in 1984, resigning only when he served as Minister of Budget and Economic Planning 1996. From 1993 he has been appointed chairman. Mario Arcelli has been for a decade one of the main economic advisors of Italian governments. He served as Head of the Economic Affairs Department at the office of the Prime Minister (Presidente del Consiglio dei Ministri) of the Republic of Italy between 1981 and 1983 (during Fanfani V and Spadolini I and II cabinets). He was also economic advisor of the Prime Minister in 1987 (Fanfani VI cabinet) and 1988-89 (De Mita cabinet). In those roles he participated to the Italian delegation to five G7 summits, the ones held in Versailles (France), Williamsburg (USA), Venezia (Italy), Toronto (Canada), Paris (France). Is commitment as civil servant got a special place aside to his academic activity. His major role in advising Italian governments on economic matters led him to be appointed in February 1996 to the position of Minister for Federico Arcelli Giorgio Di Giorgio Budget, Economic Planning and European Affairs. The appointment was the natural consequence of the resignation of the previous minister, Rainer Masera, whom Mario Arcelli was advisor to. He took this role in a really delicate moment of Italy’s history, during the Italian six-month turn as president of the Council of Europe and when the position of Minister of Treasury was vacant (the Prime Minister, Lamberto Dini, was also acting Minister of Treasury). As a representative of the president of the European Union, he chaired the “Ecofin” summit in Venice (May 1996) and continued the process that led, two years afterwards, to the birth of the Euro. In 1989 he started teaching at LUISS (then LUISS Guido Carli) university of Rome. At the same time he took the direction of the newly established “Osservatorio e Centro di Studi Monetari” (“OCSM”) in the same university. He contributed to the creation of this new centre, and this has been one of the main reasons for him for quitting “la Sapienza”. Few years later, in 1992, he was appointed rector (chancellor) of LUISS, by a board of directors still chaired by Guido Carli (who will die in 1993); Carli was the man who leaded the change from the old university “Pro Deo” in the LUISS in 1978, and he maintained the position of chairman of the administrative body until his death. Some years later, being Mario Arcelli the rector, the university has been renamed after Guido Carli, becoming “LUISS Guido Carli”. Mario Arcelli, who linked to LUISS University the most relevant part of his academic path, quitted the post of rector only when he retired, in 2002. At the end of October 2003 he has been appointed to the honorary post of “professore emerito” by the university. During his long academic activity, Arcelli published a number of articles and books. Among them we may recall the eight editions of his textbook of economics, but also many others. Since the publication of Variazioni qualitative dei fattori e progresso tecnico, he wrote close to fifteen books and around 150 articles (many of them for the two newspapers published in Rome, Il Tempo and Il Messaggero, in the period comprised between 1975 and 1997), including

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