Capital Accumulation and Related Problems: Luigi Pasinetti between Cambridge and Harvard

Pasinetti’s most fundamental contribution is his 1981 book, along with the 1988 Cambridge Journal of Economics article, which provides an input-output generalisation. Pasinetti worked on this project for 20 years, starting with his doctoral dissertation, before publishing the book. This prolonged effort resulted in an extraordinary theoretical work that positions Luigi Pasinetti among the great masters of Classical Political Economy. The originality of Luigi Pasinetti’s approach is primarily due to the extensive discussions he had during his PhD years. This paper conceptually reconstructs key points of these formative discussions and argues that Pasinetti’s Structural Economic Dynamics — characterised by a multisectoral Input-Output framework with a Kaldorian flavour — is firmly rooted in them.