Andrea Brandolini

Director General for Economics, Statistics and Research

Born in Cervia (province of Ravenna) on 7 September 1961, he graduated with honours in Economics and Business from the University of Modena in 1985. After a year as a researcher at Prometeia, he earned a Master of Science in Economics from the London School of Economics in 1988, where he continued his studies until 1992. In June of that year, he joined the Research Department of the Bank of Italy, being assigned to the Conjunctural Analysis Unit. From 1999 to 2004, he headed the Labour Market and Income Dynamics Unit, and from 2007 to 2012 he led the Economic Structure and Labour Market Division. Between 2012 and 2015, he served as a senior adviser within the Structural Economic Analysis Directorate. From 2015 to 2020, he led the Statistical Analysis Directorate and, from 2020 to 2025, he served as Deputy Director General for Economics, Statistics and Research. He has been Director General for Economics, Statistics and Research since 21 July 2025.

He has represented the Bank of Italy in several institutional bodies and working groups focused on the measurement and analysis of income, poverty, and well-being in Italy. From 1994 to 2007, he participated in the Government Commissions of Inquiry on Poverty established by various Italian administrations. In the years 2007-2008, he participated in the Inter-Institutional Commission of Inquiry on Labour, which was appointed by the Presidents of the Senate, the Chamber of Deputies, and the National Council for Economics and Labour (CNEL). In 2013, he joined the Working Group on Minimum Income, which was established by the Ministry of Labour and Social Policies. Between 2006 and 2009, he chaired Istat's Commission for the revision of the methodology for estimating absolute poverty, and he later participated in the scientific commission established by Istat to revise that same methodology between 2021 and 2024. From 2011 to 2015, he was a member of Istat's Scientific Commission on the Measurement of Well-Being. Between 2016 and 2017, he represented the Governor of the Bank of Italy in the Committee responsible for defining equitable and sustainable well-being (BES) indicators for use in national economic policy planning.

He has held numerous European and international positions in the fields of statistics and economics. From 2015 to 2020, he was a member of the Eurosystem Statistics Committee. In the years 2019-2020, he served as President of the Committee on Monetary, Financial and Balance of Payments Statistics (CMFB), having been a member of its Executive Board from 2015 to 2021. From 2017 to 2020, he served on the Bureau of the European Statistical Forum, and from 2019 to 2020 he served on the Steering Group of the Economic and Financial Committee Sub-Committee on Statistics. Between 2021 and 2023, he was a board member of the European Master in Official Statistics (EMOS), a program for advanced training in official statistics. He represented Italy in the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), an international cooperation project that collects comparable microdata on household income, for several years, and served on its Executive Board from 1997 to 2009. From 2004 to 2007, he co-directed with Timothy M. Smeeding the Luxembourg Wealth Study, a pilot project to create an internationally harmonised database on household wealth. In the years 2015-2016, he was a member of the Core Group of the Commission on Global Poverty, which was established by the World Bank to evaluate and improve global poverty measurement methodologies. He also served on the Advisory Board of EUROMOD, the EU tax-benefit microsimulation model, during the periods 1998-2000, 2010-2013, and 2024-2026.

He has been a member of Comstat, the Steering and Coordination Committee for Statistical Information, since 2016, with a term ending in 2028. He served on Istat's Scientific Committee from 2017 to 2022, the International Evaluation Committee of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) from 2019 to 2025, the Supervisory Board of the National Research Council (CNR) from 2022 to 2024, and the Research Committee of LUISS University from 2019 to 2025.

He was President of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth (IARIW) from 2008 to 2010 and served on its Executive Council from 2000 to 2012. He was also a council member of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ) from 2007 to 2013 and of the Italian Economic Association (SIE) from 2019 to 2022. In 1998, he was a Jemolo Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. He is a fellow of the Human Development and Capability Association (HDCA) and of the World Inequality Database (WID), and a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).

He has served as Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Inequality and sat on the editorial boards of the Review of Income and Wealth, the Italian Economic Journal, and Politica economica - Journal of Economic Policy. He is also one of the founders of Neodemos, a website providing demographic information and analysis for non-specialist audiences.

He has edited volumes and authored articles on a range of economic and social topics, including labour economics, demography, income and wealth dynamics, poverty and well-being measurement, and the history of economic thought. A partial list of his publications is available on IDEAS/RePEc. In recognition of his work on income inequality, he received the Aldi Hagennars LIS Memorial Award from the Luxembourg Income Study in 1995 and the Luigi Tartufari International Prize from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in 2017.