Thirty-sixth session of ECLAC

Mariana Mazzucato is an Italian economist and currently RM Phillips Professor in the Economics of Innovation at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom.

She advises public policymakers around the world on innovation-led growth and is currently a member of the Scottish government’s Council of Economic Advisers, a member of the World Economic Forum’s Council on the Economics of Innovation and a permanent member of the European Commission’s Expert Group on Innovation for Growth, among other things.

She has held academic posts at the University of Denver, the London Business School, the Open University and the University of Bocconi. Her most recent book, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public Vs. Private Sector Myths (Anthem, 2013), which focuses on the need to develop new frameworks of thought to understand the role of the State in economic growth and on ways of enabling rewards from innovation to be just as “social” as the risks taken, was on the 2013 Financial Times Books of the Year list.

Mariana Mazzucato won the Hans-Matthöfer-Preis in 2015 and the New Statesman SPERI Prize in Political Economy in 2014. In 2013, The New Republic named her one of the “three most important thinkers about innovation”. She holds a doctorate and master’s degree in Economics from the New School for Social Research (New York) and a bachelor’s degree in Literature, History and International Relations from Tufts University (Boston).