The Briefing: Robert Mundell and Vitor Constancio

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By Jonathan Wilkinson

BOLOGNA, Italy — On Thursday, Oct. 25, Vitor Constancio will be coming to SAIS Europe to deliver the Robert A. Mundell Global Risk Annual Lecture on the optimum currency area (OCA) theory and the euro as part of the SAIS Global Risk Conference. The lecture will take place at 6:30 p.m. in the auditorium.

Robert Mundell is one of the world’s foremost economists, winning the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1999 for his work on optimum currency areas, which paved the way for the introduction of the euro in 2002. He was a professor at SAIS, including at SAIS Europe, for four years between 1959 and 2001. Professor Mundell will be returning to Bologna for this special lecture.

Vitor Constancio was the vice president of the European Central Bank from 2010 to 2018 during the worst of the eurozone financial crisis. Prior to that, he held a series of prominent positions in the Portuguese financial sector. Notably, he was governor of the Banco de Portugal, the Portuguese central bank, from 1985 to 1986 and 2006 to 2010. He was also finance minister from 1977 to 1978.

Prof. Constancio is also a prodigious academic. He received his degree in economics from the Instituto Superior de Ciências Económicas e Financeiras (now called ISEG) at Universidade Técnica de Lisboa. He was an assistant professor at ISEG from 1968 to 1973, and later senior professor from 1989 to 2010. He is currently president of the school council at ISEG and a professor at the University of Navarra in Madrid.

As the eurozone emerges from crisis with many issues still unresolved, Prof. Constancio’s lecture is an opportunity to learn first-hand from one of the individuals most closely involved in the crisis.