Introduction to Luigi Pasinetti's 'Causality and interdependence …'

Luigi Pasinetti was one of the pioneers of Econometrics in Italy and gave the Inaugural Address to the country’s first ever course in econometrics, that was offered by the Catholic University of Milan in the Academic year 1964-1965. The Lecture was originally published in Italian in 1965 and is here presented in English for the first time. In this Lecture Pasinetti offered a wide ranging methodological introduction to the different approaches to econometric modelling, discussing their relationship to economic theory. In particular, he highlights the contrast between causal and interdependent relations in econometrics and proposes employing this contraposition as a means of distinguishing the fundamental characteristics of the main approaches, neoclassical, classical and post-Keynesian, in economic theory.