In Memoriam: Professor Giovanni Andrea Cornia Chiara Mariotti and Francesco Manaresi

The passing of Giovanni Andrea Cornia on 10^th of July 2024 has saddened many people around the globe, many of whom had been his former students at the University of Florence, where he had been teaching since the year 2000 and coordinated the PhD in Development Economics.

The two of us (Chiara and Francesco) had the privilege to attend his classes around those early years at the Florentine Atheneum, which coincided with the heydays of the anti-globalization movement, with its joyful meetings at the Global Social Forum – including the European chapter in Florence in 2002, and its optimistic slogans, like ‘Another world is possible’.

In those years, the classes of Giovanni Andrea Cornia (whom students fondly called GAC, to mark the reverence we had for him, while nodding to his sense of humor) gave us the analytical instruments to unpack the economic processes that were driving the discontents of globalization and more importantly to gain awareness that alternatives were indeed possible – alternative policies based on heterodox economic theories rooted in structuralism. As we were learning about these alternatives on photocopied half hand-written half-typed notes (which were given to us in haphazard installments), Cornia was in fact typing them up in two important volumes: Inequality Growth and Poverty in an Era of Liberalisation and Globalisation (2004) and Pro-poor Macroeconomics (2006).

The first volume analysed changes in within‐country income inequality since the early 1980s, and traced the drivers of such increase in the policy‐driven worsening of factorial income distribution, wage spread, and spatial inequality – i.e. in liberalisation and globalisation policies. One of the first to argue that economic inequality is the outcome of policy choices, Cornia dedicated his career to identify the policy pathways that can lead to equitable growth and poverty reduction, putting emphasis on the distributive impact of reforms in trade and financial liberalization, taxation, public expenditure, safety nets, and labour markets.

Detailing such pathways was the focus of the second volume and of later pieces like Towards Human Development: New Approaches to Macroeconomics and Inequality (2014) and The Macroeconomics of Developing Countries (2020). Among the key elements of a package of pro-poor structuralist macroeconomic policies, he included countercyclical fiscal and monetary policies with a greater role for automatic and discretionary stabilizers, progressive tax policies, a competitive exchange rate regime, capital control and a surplus of the current account balance towards reducing dependence on foreign savings and lowering indebtedness. Crucially, he emphasized the importance of taking into account the specific structural characteristics of developing countries in identifying the most appropriate context-specific policy package.

The early 2000s were also the years in which the social impact of the disastrous approach to the economic transition of former soviet countries had become manifest, and this was a frequent topic of discussion in Prof. Cornia’s classes. He had been among the first to study the impact of the Soviet bloc’s collapse on children, during his tenure as Director of the Economic and Social Policy Research Programme at the UNICEF Innocenti Research Center in Florence (1988-1995), when he provided actionable policy recommendations to mitigate the costs of the transition for children (Children and the Transition to the Market Economy: Safety Nets and Social Policy in Central and Eastern Europe, with Sàndor Sipos – 1991). His interest in transition economies was further reinforced during his appointment as Director of the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER, 1995-1999), where he continued to study the transition’s mortality crisis among children and the elderly (The Transition Mortality Crisis, with Renato Paniccià – 2000), providing compelling evidence in favor of a gradual, human-centered approach to the transition, in contrast to the “shock therapy” advocated by the Washington Consensus.

Crucially, since his Adjustment with a Human Face, written in 1987 with Francis Stewart and Richard Jolly, the work of Professor Cornia has sent the important message that macroeconomic policy choices have everything to do with inequality and with poverty reduction, contributing to keep international financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund accountable for the human impact of their lending programs. The legacy of this message is manifest in the work of academics and civil society around the world, which today continue to condemn international financial institutions whenever they perpetuate austerity policies or fail to engage with alternative and context-specific policy approaches.

As a teacher, Prof. Cornia brought all his knowledge and studies to his lectures and helped students develop original research projects. His support enabled many generations of students to enter the world of economic research and policy analysis.

Among the many lessons he taught us and many others, a few stand out: the need to understand the structural economic characteristics of each country, the relevance of inequality and poverty as key variables to evaluate the impact of macroeconomic policies, and the impact that rigorous economic analysis can have on policy-making. He showed us that economics could be a discipline for change and for justice, while entertaining us with humor, curiosity and much respect. These lessons still drive our work today.

Dear professor, rest in power and in peace.