BACHI, RICCARDO

BACHI, RICCARDO (1875–1951) Italian economist and statistician. Bachi was born in Turin and studied in Venice. He laid the foundations for the scientific study of price fluctuations and wrote on the economic history of the Risorgimento. From 1904 to 1908 Bachi edited the Italian Labor Department bulletin on employment, and from 1909 to 1921 he issued L'Italia Economica, an annual publication which he founded. From 1915 Bacchi taught statistics and economics at the universities of Macerata, Parma, and Genoa, and in 1926 he was appointed to the chair of political economy at the Royal Institute of Economic Sciences in Rome. After the enactment of the anti-Jewish laws in Italy in 1938, he went to Palestine, where from 1940 to 1946, he lectured at the Tel Aviv branch of the Hebrew University. In 1946 he returned to the University of Rome. Interested in Zionism from the 1920s, he investigated the economic history of Jews, in particular the economic relations between Jews and non-Jews in the Diaspora. Noteworthy among Bachi's writings are his Principi di scienza economica, 2 vols. (1937–40), Israele disperso e ricostruito (1952), and his introduction to the Hebrew translation of Simḥah Luzzatto's "On the Jews of Venice" (Ma'amar al Yehudei Veneẓyah, 1950).

bibliography:

L. Einaudi, Riforma Sociale (1931), 416ff.; rmi, 16 (1950), 14–216; A.M. Ratti, Vita e opere di Riccardo Bachi (1961), 69–100 (bibliography).

[Joseph Baruch Sermoneta]