Mauro Bonaiuti, PhD, teaches Ecological economics on the Master's on Socio-Environmental Sustainability and Solidarity Economy and Sustainability programme at the

University of Turin The University of Turin (Italian language, Italian: ''Università degli Studi di Torino'', UNITO) is a public university, public research university in the city of Turin, in the Piedmont (Italy), Piedmont region of Italy. It is one of the List ...

. He is co-founder of the Italian Degrowth Association and among the promoters of the Italian Solidarity Economy Network. Appreciated as one of the most notable experts on the bioeconomics theory of

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (born Nicolae Georgescu, 4 February 1906 – 30 October 1994) was a Romanian mathematician, statistician and economist. He is best known today for his 1971 ''The Entropy Law and the Economic Process'', in which he argu ...

, Bonaiuti is the editor of 'From Bioeconomics to Degrowth' (2011), a collection of papers by Georgescu-Roegen published by Routledge. Following on from his books on bioeconomics, Bonaiuti's latest monograph is entitled 'The Great Transition' (Routledge 2014). Tapping into the intuitions of several early twentieth-century biologists, and in particular

Joseph Tainter Joseph Anthony Tainter (born December 8, 1949) is an American anthropologist and historian. Biography Tainter studied anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and Northwestern University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1975. he hol ...

's analysis of the collapse of complex societies, Bonaiuti puts forward the theory that advanced capitalist societies have been entering, and ever more so since the 1970s, a phase of "diminishing marginal returns." Bonaiuti's research began in 2006 with the gathering of a large quantity of empirical evidence from various disciplines. It offers an original interpretation of the phenomenon of so-called ' secular stagnation', or, as someone has also termed it, 'the end of growth'. Nearly ten years on from the

Great Recession The Great Recession was a period of marked general decline, i.e. a recession, observed in national economies globally that occurred from late 2007 into 2009. The scale and timing of the recession varied from country to country (see map). At ...

, notwithstanding that the panic has dispelled and the financial markets have started to recover, there is still no clear evidence of a return to growth in the West. As illustrated in his book, this is not linked to normal oscillations in the economic cycle, but rather is systemic in nature, and in particular is connected to the growing complexity of social organizations (military forces, bureaucracies, health services, education, research). Bonaiuti says the West's failure to return to growth is also linked to the fall in yields of its new tertiary economy as well as to increasing costs of energy and raw materials. In other words, it is a process that is, by nature, progressive and one that takes place over a longer period of time. This would go to explain the impotence and ineffectiveness of remedial measures that have been adopted until today, all born of traditional forms of economic policy.

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Bonaiuti, Mauro Academic staff of the University of Turin Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Degrowth advocates Ecological economists People associated with criticism of economic growth Italian economists

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