by Mario Deaglio, University of Turin
A hearty welcome both to those who have reached this newsletter website following a precise search path and to those who have stumbled upon it by pure chance!
What you have before you is an attempt to close a gap in both our common and our specialist knowledge of the international economy. International economists usually exchange their knowledge with each other in technical language; they hardly ever have contacts with interested nonprofessionals and, in this way, a large stretch of ground in our rapidly changing international economic landscape runs the risk of remaining hidden and sterile.
Those who take part in this project are all international economists operating in various specialist files. They share, however, a common approach to the problems and promises of today’s international economy. This approach can be described as dominated by three Cs: Curiosity, Comparison and Coherence. Curiosity, because we react to the monumental changes that are taking place in front of us without shutting ourselves up in our research departments and in acquired notions and theories. On the contrary, we eagerly examine new evidence and try to keep our minds open to the changing scene in front of us even if this means challenging well-established conventional notions.
Comparison of conditions, results and developments has been the standard approach of most of us in recent years. We feel that when general theories appear to be wanting, the comparative method might prove a suitable way to arrive at conclusions. Coherence, the sense that all our findings and all our considerations must be scientifically consistent: not elements of curiosity but rather bricks suitable to building new intellectual constructions.
Our initial goal has been, and still is, to understand what makes Emerging Economies tick and how they compare with Europe and, more specifically, Italy. We followed a dual approach, using both macro and micro data and established good connections first with the South Korean, then with the Chinese and Indian scientific community.
The present initiative is the continuation of a former common experience. We have been encouraged by our sponsors, Compagnia di San Paolo, one of the largest Italian foundations, to extend our research and to broaden our targets. This is happening in two different ways:
- We are planning to gradually extend the use of methods we have developed for the study of East Asian Economies to the analysis of Northern Africa economies and, later, Latin American.
- We aim to disseminate our results not only to the scientific community but also to the Italian business community, in particular to industrial enterprises in the North West of the country, from whose experience with emerging countries we might have much learn to whose knowledge of those economies we might contribute something. This will be done with specific dissemination seminars that will go side by side with scientific seminars.
Another instrument addressed both to the scientifically community and to interested nonprofessionals is this newsletter. It will be issued three times a year and contain, alongside news about our initiatives, some draft products of our research, some preliminary studies as well as comment and reflections over them.
We would like all readers that feel interested to stay in touch by enlisting in order to receive both future issues of this newsletter and notices of our initiatives. This inaugural issue will present a note by Professor Vittorio Valli, questioning the concept of BRICS and proposing a more inclusive definition, and a short essay by Professor Andrea Serafino, discussing the perspectives of the judicial-economic reform in Vietnam. Some of the works presented at the first OEET Workshop on “Asian emerging economies in the post crisis era: growth trajectories, challenges and perspectives”, held in Turin on March 12-13 2015, are then introduced and summarized.
