The Political Economy of Luigi Pasinetti

For many decades, we have been closely associated with Pasinetti’s research, though in different ways and in different capacities due to our belonging to different academic age cohorts. Through all those years, we have had many opportunities to discuss with him his contributions to economic theory, which we have always found greatly inspiring, even when following research tracks different from his. In a nutshell, we could say we all share with Pasinetti a deep commitment to the structural dynamics approach to economic theory and political economy.Our close personal and intellectual acquaintancewith Pasinetti makes it difficult for us to write a standard comprehensive introduction, which would have to consider the manifold areas of our collaboration with him and involvement with his lines of research. On many occasions, we wrote essays dealingwith specific features of his approach to economic theory. For this reason, we decided to focus our attention on what are, in our view, Pasinetti’s key contributions to theory-building and to highlight the unifying train of thought flowing through all of them.