Department of Italian Studies Research Seminar Series

Italy and the Political Economy of Europe

Joseph Halevi, University of Sydney

This seminar will be conducted in Italian.

Abstract

This seminar follows Joseph Halevi’s 2019 research on Europe’s political economy since 1945 undertaken for the New York based Institute for New Economic Thinking. It will deal with the three phases of the process of post 1945 European integration. The specificity of each phase will be explained in connection with the transformation of Continental Western Europe into an export led prone economic system. It will be pointed out that such an orientation is a de-stabilising factor in the European wide economic relations. In this context the role and the evolution of Italy will be analysed in each stage. In particular it will be argued that Italy came to represent the weak form of export-oriented dynamics as opposed to the strong version represented by Germany and its area. Italy does not have the particular political and institutional leeway of France the lack of which would have made it into a weaker country. Italy’s position within the EMU is fragile whereas a return to competitive devaluations is impossible and undesirable.

About the speaker

Joseph Halevi was born in Haifa – then British Palestine, now Israel – on November 1946. He was educated in Rome at the Sapienza University. His thesis was on the macrodynamics of Michal Kalecki supervised by the late Professors Sergio Steve and Paolo Sylos Labini. He taught Economics at the New School for Social Research in New York and at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He joined the Economics Department of the University of Sydney in late 1978 retiring in 2016. in 1983 he was Professore Ricercatore at the Sapienza University, visiting Professor at the University of Connecticut from 1985 to 1987. From 1987 till 2009 he regularly taught part of the year at the Universities of Grenoble, Nice and of Picardie. Since 2009 he is Professor at the International University College in Turin. In May 2019 he taught at the Università della Calabria. His publications include the four-volume set edited with Geoffrey Harcourt, Peter Kriesler and John Nevile, Post Keynesian Essays Down Under, Palgrave 2016.

For more information, contact: A/Prof Francesco Borghesi – francesco.borghesi@sydney.edu.au