Board of Directors

In 1989 Michele De Benedictis  was the first agricultural economist to be elected Fellow of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the most prestigious Italian Scientific Academy. In 1996 he was among the founders of the Associazione per Studi e Ricerche Manlio Rossi-Doria of which he has been President throughout its life. In more recent years he was awarded Lifetime Membership by the International Association of Agricultural Economists. He was emeritus member of the European Association of Agricultural Economists and by the Italian Association of Agricultural and Applied Economics. His research interests concentrated in two main areas: – theoretical issues and quantitative methods applied to production economics: his work was instrumental in accelerating the “modernization” of agricultural economics research in Italy in the area; – agricultural production and structural adjustment in Agriculture in Southern Italy, with particular emphasis on issues linked to efficiency and equity. In 1979 Michele De Benedictis published – with Vincenzo Cosentino – Economia dell’Azienda Agraria, a production economics textbook that made profound innovations in the traditional teaching of farm management in Italy and that represents the major output of his research efforts during this period. Later on his research interests moved toward agricultural policy, with specific attention to the problems of the Common Agricultural Policy, international economics and international trade and, more recently, neo-institutional economics and its potential implications for agricultural economics research. Throughout is prolific career Michele De Benedictis wrote more than 150 scientific papers in Italian, English, French and Spanish. Biography of Michele De Benedictis (Italian). Il percorso biografico di Michele De Benedictis, by Anna Carbone and Roberto Henke. In: Michele De Benedictis: scritti scelti 1964-2008, edited by Anna Carbone, Fabrizio De Filippis and Roberto Henke, edizioni l’ancora del mediterraneo, 2009