The Bocconi boys go to Brussels: Italian economic ideas, professional networks and European austerity

This article shows how a specific set of Italian economic ideas, which were first formulated in the first half of the twentieth century and later espoused by a network of economists from Bocconi University, Milan, came to play an important role in shaping European policy responses to the Great Reces...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of European public policy 2016-03, Vol.23 (3), p.392-409
Main Author: Helgadóttir, Oddný
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
20th century
Austerity
Austerity policy
Center and periphery
Colleges & universities
economic ideas
Economic policy
Economists
European crisis
Networks
Policy making
Political economy
Political power
Power
Recessions
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Summary:This article shows how a specific set of Italian economic ideas, which were first formulated in the first half of the twentieth century and later espoused by a network of economists from Bocconi University, Milan, came to play an important role in shaping European policy responses to the Great Recession and establishing the doctrine of 'expansionary austerity.' It argues that two factors - the formalization of these ideas in the language of mainstream economics and the establishment of professional networks that operated across a host of linked ecologies - contributed to their influence. The result was a 'boomerang effect', or a transfer of economic ideas from the European periphery to centers of policy-making power and back again. This phenomenon is understudied in the existing political economy literature, which tends to assume that ideational traffic is one-way, with ideas originating in centers of power and travelling from there to the periphery.
ISSN:1350-1763
1466-4429
DOI:10.1080/13501763.2015.1106573