Mario Nuti (1937–2020)
Mario Nuti (1937–2020)

Summary/Abstract: Domenico Mario Nuti, known as Mario Nuti, was an eminent Italian economist who most of his professional life spent in Cambridge, but for whom Poland has always been his beloved country and the top subject of research. His first field of study in Warsaw, under supervision of Michał Kalecki, was the Polish methodology of examining economic efficiency of investment projects which was rather unique among the Soviet Bloc countries. After Nuti moved to King’s College of Cambridge University he continued research on that methodology, at the same time tightly observing economic reforms in Poland and other countries in Central and Eastern Europe. He published a lot in the latter field of research when at the University of Birmingham he directed the Centre for Russian and East European Studies. He also published then a number of important papers, critical of mainstream economics. Nuti’s output in those fields of investigation is discussed in section two of this essay. Section three deals with his work at the European University Institute in Florence and as an economic adviser on Central and Eastern Europe in the Department for Economic and Financial Affairs (DG II) of the European Commission. The Polish reader may find of special interest the account of Nuti’s direct involvement and his intellectual contribution to devising and implementing a new course in Poland’s transformation in the years of his close cooperation with Grzegorz Kołodko, then the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance. Nuti was an uncompromising critic of a Bolshevik mode of socialism. He examined at length various types of socialism, never abandoning hope that democratic socialism is possible and viable in its economic and political dimensions. In the face of ever new economic and social challenges he sought socialist solutions to those challenges that would make the political system just and of equal opportunities. In all his life Nuti was a passionate and true socialist. He could have been an ideological icon for Polish contemporary social democrats, should there still be any.

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