WIIW The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies - Wiener Institut für Internationale Wirtschaftsvergleiche

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Laski Lectures

Łaski Lectures are annual lectures held in memoriam of Kazimierz Łaski (1921 -2015), the former Scientific Director of wiiw.
The lecture is organized in cooperation with the Chamber of Labour in Vienna.

Kazimierz Łaski (1921-2015)
was a Polish-Austrian economist and one of the most prominent representatives of Post-Keynesian economics in Austria. He graduated in economics in 1954, intellectually shaped by his mentor Michał Kalecki. In 1968 Łaski lost his professorship during a new wave of antisemitism, was forced to leave Poland and lived in Austria since then. Josef Steindl and Franz Nemschak invited him to work at the Department of Comparative Economic Studies at the Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO). This department was the basis for the wiiw which was founded in 1973. Łaski continued to work as economist there. In 1971 he also became Professor of Economics the Johannes Kepler University Linz where he taught for 20 years. From 1991 to 1996 he held the position of Scientific Director of wiiw. Until his death in 2015 he participated in the work of the institute as senior research associate. He worked intensively on transition economies and critically assessed the shock therapy in the 1990s, as well as austerity measures after the outbreak of the latest economic crisis.