Francesco Di Comite

Political Administrator, Council of the EU,

He was awarded his undergraduate degree from Bocconi University, Milan, and his Master and PhD in Economics from the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL).

He started his career as a UCLouvain researcher specialised in international trade, industrial organisation, location theory, publishing papers on non-homothetic demand preferences to explain firm-level export patterns. After short research stays in the Statistics Division of the United Nations Economic and Social Committee for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP) and the Research Department of the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB), Washington D.C., USA, Francesco joined the European Commission in 2011 as a country desk officer for Latvia in DG ECFIN, where he worked on the analysis of the Balance-of-Payment crisis of the country, collecting inputs from colleagues from the IMF, World Bank, central banks and national institutions.

In 2013 Francesco moved to the Directorate-General Joint Research Centre to work on model-based impact assessment of European Cohesion Policy and investments on EU regions, supporting the developments of the Spatial Computable General Equilibrium (SCGE) model RHOMOLO maintained by the Regional Economic Modelling team.

Francesco’s main research interests include international trade, industrial organisation, location theory and their applications in the area of external competitiveness measurement, urban economics and regional development.

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