Guido Carli

Nationality

Italy

Date of Birth

1914

Date of Death

1993

Political
Preference

Liberal

Guido Carli was born in Brescia, son of the prominent fascist sociologist Filippo Carli. He graduated in Law from the University of Padua and became a banker.

In 1937, Carli joined the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction in a managerial capacity. He was not an anti-fascist militant, but publicly expressed on several occasions his aversion to the economic policy of fascist leaders. Nevertheless, in 1939 he became involved in planning for war.

From 1945 onwards, he was a member of the National Consultative Assembly and a board member of the Italian Foreign Exchange Office, of which he was appointed Chief Advisor three years later. In 1947 he became Executive Director for Italy of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and then from 1950 to 1952 the President of the European Payments Union (EPU) – of which he remained a member until 1958. As such, he was one of the leaders of Europe’s return to multilateral trade.
Domestically, Carli was one of the protagonists of the institutional transformation of Italy from a close-ended protected economy into an open-market based society, contributing to the development of supranational economic institutions. In his memoirs (Fifty Years of Italian Life, 1993) he established a parallelism in ideas between the EPU and the European Monetary Union (EMU), for the latter he was a strong advocate.