Perfil
Vito Tanzi was born and raised in Italy and is now a citizen of both Italy and the USA. He lives in the USA.
He received degrees in economics from Harvard University, (MA, 1963, and PhD, 1967), and from George Washington University, (BA, 1959, with “special honors in economics”, and MA, 1961). In 1967-75 he was Professor of Economics (and Department Chair in 1970-73) at the American University, in Washington DC.
In 1975 he joined the IMF, as Head of the Tax Policy Division and in 1981 he was promoted Director of the Fund’s Fiscal Affairs Department, a position that he held until 2000. In 2001-2003 he was Undersecretary for Economy and Finance, in the Italian Government in Rome. After that experience, he spent some years as a visiting scholar at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington. From 1990 to 1994 he had served as President of the International Institute of Public Finance (IIPF), of which he is now Honorary President.
He has been awarded honorary degrees from the universities of Torino and Bari, in Italy; Cordoba, in Argentina; Liege, in Belgium; and Lisbon, in Portugal.
He has also received various important prizes. He is an external member of the Lisbon Academy of Science, and a member of the TIGER Scientific Advisory Board, at Kozminski University, in Warsaw (Poland). In 2024 he was included in the “30 Great Minds Hall of Fame”, of Babes Bolyai University, in Romania. He is listed in Who’s Who in the World. An economic effect (the “Tanzi effect”) was named after him.
He has been a consultant to the UN, the European Commission, the European Central Bank, The World Bank, The Organization of American States. and the InterAmerican Development Bank.
He has published 26 books. Recent ones are: Government Versus Markets (Cambridge University Press: 2011); Fragile Futures: The Uncertain Economics of Disasters, Pandemics and Climate Change (Cambridge University Press: 2022); The Economics of Government (Oxford University Press: 2020); The Termites of the State: How Complexity Leads to Inequality (Cambridge University Press: 2018); Monitoring the State or the Market (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
He is the author of hundreds of articles, many of them in top economics journals.
