Professor Antonio Andreoni

Antonio Andreoni is Professor of Development Economics at the Department of Economics of SOAS University of London and Co-Director of the Centre for Sustainable Structural Transformation (CSST).

Antonio is a political economist focusing on industrial and technological change and its impact on the macroeconomy, labour, society, and ecology. His work investigates the restructuring of capitalist relations at country and global levels and blends in-depth analyses of industrial sectors and context-specific investigations of the role of the state, institutions and industrial policy. In Europe he has worked on key industries such as big pharma, automation and renewable energies, as well as processes of innovative industrial renewal at the regional level. He has conducted extensive research in low and middle-income countries – especially Southern and Eastern Africa – on how to promote sustainable structural transformation, including work on models of production and value chains; finance and rents; energy transition and critical minerals; market, organisational and platform power; institutional change and corruption. He has also conducted research on global industries and comparative political economy analyses across middle-income countries.

Antonio has published over 40 academic papers in international peer review journals including World Development, Development and Change, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Industrial and Corporate Change, Technovation, Energy Policy, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, BMJ and Oxford Review of Economic Policy. He contributed over 30 papers to academic volumes; he edited 6 volumes and published 1 co-authored book (other 2 co-authored books in Italian). He has extensive editorial experience, and he is currently co-editor of Competition and Change and a member of the editorial board of the Italian Economic Journal. Antonio has led multi-million interdisciplinary research programmes involving large consortia of researchers from across different countries and disciplines, coordinated large teams of postdoctoral researchers and accompanied to completion as primary supervisor eight PhDs.

With Ha-Joon Chang, he was co-founder of the SOAS Centre for Sustainable Structural Transformation. At SOAS he also served as Deputy Dean for Research & Knowledge Exchange of the SOAS College of Development, Economics and Finance (renamed College of Social Sciences) and was Co-Research Director of the SOAS ACE Anticorruption Evidence Consortium (2016-2020). Antonio's research has received funding from UK Aid (DFID and FCDO), Hyundai Motor Group, Open Society Foundation, Gatsby Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Tide Foundation, African Climate Foundation and UNU-WIDER.

Antonio is a Distinguished Visiting Professor, South African Research Chair in Industrial Development (SARChI) at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa; also, Member of the Academic Board of the Centre for Industrial Development and Environmental Governance (CIDEG) at Tsinghua University, China and Member of the Babbage Forum, Cambridge University, UK. He has held visiting and honorary positions in various institutions such as Cambridge University, UCL (London), wiiw (Vienna), RIFS (Berlin), Institut Mines-Telecom (Paris) and Columbia University (New York). Antonio holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge.

For over 15 years, Antonio has acted as an advisor or consultant to numerous governments and international organisations (including the World Bank, OECD and the United Nations). In 2022 he was appointed DG GROW Fellow of the Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs Directorate General of the European Commission. In 2024 he was appointed Member of the Presidential Economic Advisory Council (PEAC) of South Africa. In 2026 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine of the USA appointed him to the Ad Hoc International Committee to develop a Roadmap for Transformative Action to Achieve Health for All at Net-Zero Emissions.

• Sustainable structural transformation
• Industrial policy
• Political economy
• Production
• Industrial ecosystems
• Global value chains
• Digitalisation
• Financialisation
• Institutional change
• Competition policy