The Villa Mondragone International Economic Seminar, annual event organized by Fondazione Economia and the University of Rome "Tor Vergata", started in 1989 as an international network addressing the development and growth economic issues.

This year, the seminar will be devoted to “Capitalism in the 21st Century. Stagnation versus Growth in Europe?”.

On June 23rd, the program will include a session on the Historical Household Budgets (HHB) Project, chaired by Prof. Giovanni Vecchi.

HHB welcomes Pablo Astorga - Research Fellow at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (IBEI) and Senior Economist at Oxford Economics - as a HHB Researcher.

Pablo is an economist with considerable academic and market-oriented experience in the analysis of developing countries. During recent years Pablo has combined rigorous academic research activity with project-management assignments. Recently he has been working on issues of inequality, economic growth, productivity, and real exchange rates in Latin America and in the creation of an economic history database for the region (MOxLAD). This research has been published in Journal of Development Economics and The Economic History Review among others. Regarding qualifications, Pablo has a D.Phil. in Economics and a M.Sc. in Development Economics from the University of Oxford. He also has an MBA from IESA, Venezuela.

HHB welcomes Alessandro Tarozzi - Associate Professor in the Department of Economics and Business at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona) - as a HHB Fellow.

Alessandro is a development economist with a PhD from Princeton (2002) and a keen interest in the links between economic development and health. In his research, he has dealed with the extent and trends of child malnutrition in India during the last decades, limitations of commonly used approached in small area statistics, the welfare impact in LDCs of trade policies adopted by richer trade partners, adopting a broad set of methodologies, including randomized controlled trials (RCTs), quasi-experimental methods and structural estimation. The results has been published in high-ranked journals in Economics as well as Demography, Statistics, Environmental Sciences and Tropical Medicine.

HHB welcomes Dr. Manfredi Alberti from the Fondazione Einaudi (Turin) as a HHB Fellow.

Manfredi received a PhD in History from the University of Florence, with a thesis on "La scoperta dei disoccupati" ("The discovery of the unemployed"), awarded as best PhD Dissertation, and published by Florence University Press.

Manfredi's research interests cover Labour History and the History of Statistics and of Statistical Agencies. As a researcher at the Italian National Statistical Insitute, he broadened his expertise on Italian historical sources on unemployment.

Andrea Colli is Professor of Economic History at the Department of Policy Analysis and Public Management, Bocconi University, Milan.

His research interests range from the history of Italian business enterprises, to small and medium-sized enterprises, to the role played by foreign direct investments in the course of the Italian industrialization process.

He has published several articles in the main business history journals. With Michelangelo Vasta he has edited and published, in 2010, Forms of Enterprises in 20th Century Italy. Boundaries, Structures and Strategies, Elgar. With Abe de Jong and Martin Iversen, Mapping the European Corporations: Strategies, Structures, Ownership and Performance, Routledge 2011 and with Franco Amatori has written Business History: Complexities and Comparisons, Routledge 2011.