He/Him
Mario Seccareccia is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Economics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, where he taught from 1978 to 2018 in the fields of macroeconomics, monetary theory, labour economics, history of economic thought, and economic history, subjects on which he has also written extensively. He has published over 200 important academic publications, which include over 140 articles in scientific refereed journals or chapters of books, and has authored or edited 15 books or monographs. He has also edited or co-edited some 50 special issues of journals. Many of these publications are of an interdisciplinary nature and cover many areas of both economics and political economy. As visiting professor since the 1990s, Mario Seccareccia has been appointed to lecture in a number of universities in France (Université de Bourgogne, Université de Grenoble, Université Paris 13, and Université Paris-Sud), in Italy (Università di Macerata), in Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), and in China (Qufu University) and, over the years, he has participated regularly in policy debate in both Europe and North America. Among other activities, since 2004, he is editor of the International Journal of Political Economy, an interdisciplinary journal published by the Taylor & Francis Group focused primarily on policy questions of national and international scope.
In addition to having been an established academic based primarily at the University of Ottawa since 1978, he has long been connected with trade unionism in Canada. Indeed, while still being a Ph.D. student at McGill University, he began his professional career as an economist for the Associated Railway Unions in Montreal in the mid-1970s, where 17 unions conducted industry-wide collective bargaining. Among his most important activities, from 2000 to 2006, he had been either on the negotiating team or as member of the executive and then vice-president of the Association of Professors of the University of Ottawa (APUO). Moreover, from 1988 to 2006, he had been an economics instructor at the National Residential Program of the Labour College of Canada. Because of his many activities, in 2017, the Senate of Canada awarded Mario Seccareccia the Senate Sesquicentennial Medal in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Canadian Senate. This was “in recognition of his valuable service to the nation and for the quality of his academic work in the field of heterodox economics and for his intellectual support to the community.” Moreover, he was a founding member of the Progressive Economics Forum (PEF) in 1998 and played a role in 2006 in establishing the John Kenneth Galbraith Prize. Among other things, since his retirement in 2018, he lobbied to try to change the mandate of the Bank of Canada. He has been urging the federal government to include full employment as an official policy objective of the central bank, which from 1991 until its last mandate renewal in 2021 had virtually disappeared as a concern in monetary policy discourse of inflation targeting. While the 2021 renewal of the Bank of Canada mandate did not lead to a direct change of the official government mandate of two percent inflation target, concern with potential employment was rendered much more explicit in the official government document that accompanied it. Also in 2021, Mario Seccareccia received the John Kenneth Galbraith Prize in Economics by the Progressive Economics Forum for “[his] extensive contributions to heterodox economic analysis combined with his commitment to social justice … [that] exemplify Galbraith’s legacy as a public intellectual and scholar.”