Lawrence R. Klein: The Scientist and His Ties with Italy

Scientific contributions, personality and relationship with Italian Institutions of 1980 Nobel Prize winner L.R.Klein are described in this paper. Education, main steps of his scientific discoveries, dissemination work and real-world applications are presented. The main contacts with Italy went through the Bank of Italy, The Confederation of Italian Industry (Confindustria) and the University of Bologna, one of the main LINK modelling centres in Europe. A discussion on the heuristic possibilities of structural econometrics versus VAR modelling is recalled, in order to explain why the former is more used than the latter in policy making Institutions.