My international experience began when I was admitted to the United World College Adriatic, a scholarship-only international school. I left home at 17, and have since lived in more than 50 different houses, in several countries, and finished the pages of most of my passports before they were due. My theoretical foundations come from the London School of Economics, where I received my BSc (with Honours) in Economic History, and wrote my first book “The hats of the senator”, which analyzed the effects of trade barriers on exporters during the inter-war period.

The seeds of my expertise on Latin America were planted at the University of Oxford, where I pursued an MPhil, a two-year research master in the Economics and Politics of Latin America, at St Antony’s College. During the 2001-2002 economic crisis, I worked in Argentina at the Italian Embassy of Buenos Aires, and at CENIT and CIPPEC, two leading Argentinean think tanks, gathering material for my second book “The Argentinean Crisis”, published in English and Spanish.

I then pursued a PhD in the Development Studies Department of the London School of Economics, supported by scholarships from INCAE, the Centro Studi D’Agliano, the London School of Economics, and the Italian Council for Social Sciences. The leading article from my PhD thesis, published in the Journal of International Business Studies, examined the internationalization strategies of software exporters, showing that they are regional as opposed to being global in nature – it continues to be my best-cited research article: