Economic Theory and its History

Academic career and work

Neri Salvadori was born on 3 February 1951 in Naples, Italy, where he studied economics at the Facoltà di Economia e Commercio of the University of Naples and graduated in 1976 with the highest marks. He received two study grants, one from the Fondazione Einaudi for the academic year 1976/77 the other from the Banca d’Italia for 1977/78, which he used to study at the University of Manchester with Ian Steedman and then at the University of Cambridge. In 1978 he became a research assistant for the chair of Financial Mathematics at the University of Naples and then a researcher at the Institute of Finance. In 1979 he joined the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Catania, Sicily, as a lecturer of economic analysis; in 1985 he was promoted to the position of associate professor. In 1987 he moved to the Istituto Navale di Napoli, where in 1990 he was appointed to the chair of Political Economy. In 1991 he joined the University of Pisa, where he teaches and researches.

Early on in his career Neri Salvadori became deeply fascinated with the writings of the classical economists from Adam Smith to David Ricardo, and with Piero Sraffa’s revival of the classical approach to the theory of value and distribution. Sraffa’s work has was a major source of inspiration for virtually all his research activities ever since. With regard to various problems studied, Neri Salvadori elaborated new solutions and moved the frontier of research outward. These concern, in particular, the problem of the choice of technique, the determination of long-period prices and income distribution, the role of the quantities of commodities in effectual demand in the case of joint production, fixed capital and scarce natural resources, and the problem of renewable and exhaustible resources. The upshot of his respective endeavour and intellectual achievements is his book (co-authored by Heinz D. Kurz), Theory of Production: A Long-Period Analysis. The book is now widely considered a locus classicus of the respective literature of classical orientation. However, Neri Salvadori also contributed novel insights to several other fields of research. He studied the problem of price formation in the short period in a Kaleckian framework. He extended the Sraffian approach to deal with the problem of economic growth and development. He thereby did not limit the analysis to one-good models, as is typically the case in much of growth economics, whether old or new, but tackled the intricate case of economies with many industries. A major focus of his work was on neo-Keynesian contributions in the tradition of Nicholas Kaldor and Joan Robinson to the theory of economic growth and functional income distribution. Several of his contributions deal with what is known as ‘new’ or ‘endogenous’ growth theory. He showed that some of the new growth models, while couched in neoclassical terms, contain an analytical structure that is ‘classical’ in spirit. In all these works Neri Salvadori made effective use of his remarkable mathematical skills and analytical sharpness, and demonstrated an amazing knowledge of the economics literature, both modern and ancient. In more recent times he got interested in the theory of oligopoly and has produced a number of papers with new results.

His interest and expertise in the history of economic analysis materialized in a number of essays dealing with major economists, such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Léon Walras, Knut Wicksell, John von Neumann, Wassily Leontief, Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu, and especially Piero Sraffa. A characteristic feature of his respective contributions is his analytical grip on their works, which allows him to put into sharp relief similarities and differences and to elaborate on aspects these authors left undeveloped. His interest in past authors is not antiquarian; he rather wishes to know in which way economic theory has developed, and why, and what can still be learned from the masters of our discipline. Involved in editing the unpublished papers and correspondence of Piero Sraffa, Neri Salvadori has managed to solve a number of puzzles concerning the interpretation of Sraffa’s analysis and has explored the latter’s collaboration with his ‘mathematical friends’, Frank P. Ramsey, Abram S. Besicovitch and Alister Watson. In addition he has published on questions of methodology in the context under consideration.

Neri Salvadori’s publication record is outstanding. He has published and edited numerous books, several hundred papers (well over a hundred of them in peer-reviewed journals), many entries in dictionaries, book reviews etc. (See the list of his publications at the end of this book.) His work has been widely appreciated in the literature, reflected in numerous citations and references to it and by translations of his works into other languages. His excellent standing in the profession is also documented by several prizes he received, including the Premio Linceo (a lifetime achievement award given by the Accademia dei Lincei, the Italian Academy of Science) in 2004, several visiting professorships in many countries, numerous invitations to give keynote lectures, talks and seminars all over the world, several participations as lecturer in international summer schools, and highly appreciated work as referee by leading economic journals and publishing houses. Neri Salvadori also organized highly successful serial annual lectures in economic growth and development published by Cambridge University Press. Since 2004 Neri Salvadori has served as general editor (together with Heinz D. Kurz) of Metroeconomica; in addition he is a member of several editorial boards of economic journals, including The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought.

Neri Salvadori has earned himself not only the respect of his peers and colleagues, but also of his students because of the care with which he looked after them and the support he gave them. An inspiring academic teacher, he attracted numerous bright young people and interested them in promising approaches and themes, irrespective of whether they were fashionable in the profession or not. He was able to instil into them his standards of rigour, meticulousness and dedication; several of them made an academic career. His social competence is reflected in many joint papers with former students of his.