Introduction

Ian has also been awarded at various times a Nuffield Foundation Fellowship, a Leverhulme Trust Research Award, an Italian Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Award and a British Academy Small Personal Research Grant. He has been a Visiting Professor in many universities in many countries, including Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Sweden and the USA. Ian was one of the few non-Italian, and thus elected, members of the Italian Society of Economists. Ian is not only a very prolific, but also a highly versatile author, who has produced important contributions to many fields of analysis. His originality as an economic theorist and his erudition which stretches far beyond economics and its history is reflected in a great many papers he has published in major journals and numerous books he has written and edited with major publishers. His main areas of research are the theory of production, value and income distribution, including Marx’s approach; the theory of international trade; the theory of taxation; the theory of consumption; decision theory; the history of economic thought, and most recently economics and religious thought. A major source of inspiration of Ian’s work is Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (Sraffa 1960). Ian carried Sraffa’s findings over to various fields of economic analysis, showing that many of the received results and doctrines could not be sustained once a heterogeneity of commodities was allowed for. The book which early in his career earned him fame both with friend and foe was Marx after Sraffa (1977). This book was based on earlier articles published by him scrutinising Marx’s (labour) value-based reasoning against the analysis provided by Sraffa. Ian showed that many of Marx’s statements had to be abandoned in a framework in which due account was taken of the physical real costs of production and the wages paid to workers. In such cases the labour theory of value was at best superfluous or misleading. At about the same time Ian turned to the theory of international trade and published a number of papers, several together with Stanley Metcalfe, criticising the theory of international trade in the tradition of Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson. The papers were then collected in the volume Fundamental Issues in Trade Theory (1979). In a neat book entitled Trade amongst Growing Economies (1979) Ian put forward an alternative view of the problem of international trade rooted in the classical approach as revived by Sraffa. Ian applied the circular flow approach to the problems of value and distribution to several other areas of economic research, including, for instance, the theory of taxation, the classification of different forms of technical progress, especially Hicks-neutrality, the Kaleckian theory of mark-up pricing, and the concept of the industry supply curve. In addition, he elaborated on Sraffa’s analysis in various directions, including the empirically important and intricate problems of joint production, fixed capital and scarce natural resources such as land. He also clarified the distinction between basic and non-basic commodities in a joint products framework and contributed to the development of alternative descriptions of a technique, especially the method of vertical integration.

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