Robert Mundell, 1932-2021: Ahead of his Time

I met Bob Mundell in Washington in 1982, when I was already working at the International Monetary Fund, at a conference on the international monetary system. My first impression was the absolute confidence with which he expressed his views. When one of the participants in his panel claimed that the data did not confirm his views, he responded: "If the data do not confirm my views, then the data are wrong." I had the chance to follow his life and career, and to participate in the conferences he organized and chaired in the last two decades in his beloved Palazzo Mundell in Tuscany where he lived. Mundell pioneered the theory that serves as the basis for the design and implementation of economic policies in open economies. He extended the Keynesian closed-economy model, which focused on the relationship between interest rates and output, to open economies by introducing a third dimension: the exchange rate and capital mobility. It is hard to appreciate today his pathbreaking thinking on economic issues that had yet to emerge, at a time when the world was dominated by fixed exchange rates and capital controls. His research formed the foundation of international macroeconomics. In awarding him the 1999 Nobel prize in economics, the Swedish Academy of Sciences notes that: " His contribution to monetary theory and optimum currency areas remains outstanding and has inspired generations of researchers. Mundell chose the problems he analyzed with almost prophetic accuracy, predicting the future course of the international monetary system and international capital markets".