Mario Draghi Wins Schumpeter Award 2014

Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank (ECB), is this year’s winner of the Joseph A. Schumpeter Award. Vienna’s Executive City Councillor for Cultural Affairs, Andreas Mailath-Pokorny, presented the award to Mario Draghi on Thursday, March 13, 2014, at a ceremony at the Oesterreichische Nationalbank (OeNB) in Vienna. “Mario Draghi receives the Austrian Schumpeter Award for his innovative practice in economics and in monetary policymaking. The Schumpeter Award also highlights Vienna’s role as a city that sets great store by its intellectual capital. The City of Vienna aims to foster science and research, not just by promoting institutions, projects and ideas, but even more so by bestowing high-level awards e.g. on renowned economic scientists like Mario Draghi,” explained Mailath-Pokorny.

The Austrian Schumpeter Award is awarded for innovation in business management, economics and economic policy; it is financed by the Helmut-Zilk-Fonds für Internationale Beziehungen Wiens and is bestowed on recommendation of the Schumpeter Gesellschaft.

Mario Draghi was Vice Chairman and Managing Director at Goldman Sachs International, Governor of Banca d’Italia from 2006 to 2011, and has been President of the European Central Bank (ECB) since end-2011. The laudation was given by J. Hanns Pichler, board member of the Schumpeter Gesellschaft, who recalled the importance of Schumpeter’s definition of innovation, which has remained valid and compelling to this day. Pichler emphasized that Mario Draghi exemplifies Schumpeter’s principles for his innovative practices in economics and monetary policymaking alike. It is largely owing to Draghi that the ECB – as a Schumpeterian innovation – has “changed the market not only for the 18 euro area countries, but on a global scale.” Pichler went on to observe that the ECB had been really put to the test since the beginning of the international financial crisis in 2008. Mario Draghi defended the ECB’s low interest rate policy against all critics. Today, most economists agree that this policy – which is a more cautious version of the policy chosen by the U.S. Federal Reserve System – has prevented the crisis from spreading even further. However, the individual member countries made different use of the time gained by this approach to monetary policy.

Among the renowned representatives of economics, politics and academia who participated in yesterday’s award ceremony were Dieter Stiefel, chairman of the board of the Schumpeter Gesellschaft, and Ewald Nowotny, Governor of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank (OeNB), who hosted the event. Nowotny highlighted Draghi’s decisive role in crisis management. “I have known and admired Mario Draghi for many years. He ideally combines precise economic analysis with a pragmatic approach to issues at stake. This outcome explains the ECB’s success in addressing the crisis with its standard and nonstandard measures. I am very pleased to see that this outstanding achievement is being recognized through the presentation of the Schumpeter Award,” noted Governor Nowotny.

Franz Vranitzky, former Federal Chancellor of the Republic of Austria and president of the Schumpeter Gesellschaft, sent a letter of congratulations saying, “Mario Draghi is an internationally renowned economist; he studied in Rome and at the MIT in Boston, he was a professor in Florence and he worked both for the World Bank and Harvard University. What impressed the Schumpeter Gesellschaft in particular, however, is that he did not confine himself to academia, i.e. theory, but that he accepted the challenge of working in practice as well. Not many economists complete this transition at such a high level.”

Previous Schumpeter Award Winners

Vaclav Klaus (Czech Republic), Helmut Kohl (Federal Republic of Germany), Ted Turner (CNN), Josei Itho (Nippon Life), Reinhard Mohn (Bertelsmann), Helmut Sohmen (Hong Kong), Derek C. Bok (Harvard), Romano Prodi (EU), Ferdinand Piëch (VW), Peter Brabeck-Letmathe (Nestlé), James David Wolfensohn (World Bank), Jorma Ollila (Nokia), Günter Verheugen (EU), Nandan M. Nilekani (Infosys Technologies), Tatsuro Matsumae (Tokai University), Hans Adam II, Prince of Liechtenstein, Joachim Hunold (Air Berlin), Barry Eichengreen (University of California, Berkeley), Frank Stronach (Magna International), Güler Sabancı (Sabancı Holding, Istanbul)

Further information:                                                              

Schumpeter Gesellschaft
Christian Minutilli
Agentur Trevia
Phone: (+43-699) 10385152

Vienna City Administration
City Hall
Office of City Councillor Andreas Mailath-Pokorny
Daniel Benyes
Phone: (+43-1) 4000-81175