#eofpeople
Restarting the Economy:
another economy is thinkable
by Luca Iacovone
published in Avvenire on 11/26/2025
José Tomás Hargous, a thirty-year-old Chilean, will be among the participants of Restarting the Economy, the major global gathering promoted by The Economy of Francesco, to be held in Castel Gandolfo from November 28 to 30. He will arrive with a body of research developed at the Enterprise and Humanism Institute of the University of Navarra and through daily dialogue with USEC (Unión Social de Empresarios, Ejecutivos y Emprendedores Cristianos) in Chile. At the heart of his studies lies a clear idea: the enterprise is not a simple economic mechanism, but a community capable of influencing the growth of people and the territory in which it operates. He analyzes organizational governance from this concrete perspective, showing how the quality of a company emerges from the way it distributes responsibilities, builds processes, activates real relationships, and enables the maturation of its members. At the core of his work is the conviction that the enterprise is not merely an economic mechanism, but a community that shapes people and the territory in which it operates.
The entrepreneurial humanism he explores is not an ethical label, but a concrete perspective on corporate governance. Indeed, it is precisely in the folds of organizational life that this vision finds its strength. Looking at processes, internal relationships, the distribution of power, and the way decisions are made: this, he argues, is where the quality of an organization is measured.
A company truly grows when its community grows, when profit is a consequence rather than a goal, and when production generates human value as well as economic value.
Thousands of kilometers away, another young scholar, the Italian Luca Castellanza, follows a different trajectory to arrive at a similar question. In his work on mining districts in Ghana, he analyzes destructive entrepreneurial ecosystems—contexts in which illegality, informality, illegitimacy, and invisibility are not exceptions but structural pillars. Castellanza reconstructs data, interviews, and documents, showing how, in the absence of strong institutions, economic activity can become predatory, generating social and environmental degradation.
His thesis is necessary, however uncomfortable, because one cannot truly speak of innovation or regeneration without also understanding the spaces in which the economy produces violence. Transformation requires the ability to recognize what happens when corporate responsibility fails and when institutional voids allow models that thrive on destruction.
The dialogue between these two trajectories—entrepreneurial humanism and the analysis of destructive contexts—will be at the heart of the discussion at the end of November during Restarting the Economy, the Global Event of The Economy of Francesco scheduled in Castel Gandolfo from November 28 to 30. Three days in which young economists, entrepreneurs, scholars, and activists from more than thirty countries will work on some of the structural challenges of our time: debt, work that liberates, care as social infrastructure, and the rest of the land as a sign of the Jubilee. The program—combining plenary sessions, thematic workshops, short presentations, and moments of dialogue—stems from the idea that economic transformation requires not only new analyses, but above all new tools, new alliances, and new forms of practical imagination.
In this scenario, the contributions of Hargous and Castellanza will offer two complementary lenses through which to read what happens inside and around the enterprise: on the one hand, the exploration of the conditions that allow organizations to generate human value; on the other, the need to recognize those contexts in which economic production is intertwined with exclusion and degradation. A fruitful tension that will be essential to the shared work of the Global Event.
For those who, reading these stories, feel their curiosity and desire to follow closely the journey toward Castel Gandolfo growing, but will not be able to attend in person, there is still an opportunity. All the plenary sessions of Restarting the Economy will be streamed live on the YouTube channel of The Economy of Francesco.
