Introduction

Luigi Pasinetti was born on 12 September 1930 at Zanica, near Bergamo, northern Italy. He was the eldest son of a small entrepreneur who got into considerable financial difficulties in the years of Luigi’s adolescence, immediately after the war. This event undoubtedly influenced Luigi’s decision to study economics as he moved from secondary education (at Bergamo) to university education (at Milan). He received his first university degree (laurea, summa cum laude) from the Catholic University of Milan in 1954 with a doctoral thesis on ‘Econometric models and their application to trade cycle analysis’. He was subsequently awarded a British Council Scholarship and two Stringer Scholarships of the Bank of Italy for graduate studies at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, England (for the academic years 1956–7 and 1958–9) and at Harvard University in the USA (1957–8). He then went to Oxford University, where he spent a year (1959–60) as a research student and a second year (1960–1) as a research fellow of Nuffield College. In 1961 Richard Kahn called Pasinetti back to Cambridge where he was elected a Fellow of King’s College; he remained there until 1976. The graduate work done at Cambridge, Harvard and Oxford allowed him to complete his PhD in economics at the University of Cambridge in 1962 with a well-known dissertation, ‘A Multi-Sector Model of Economic Growth’ (the dissertation itself was never published, but it formed the basis for a revised and expanded version, see Pasinetti, 1981).