Davide Cichero was part of the Delegation that accompanied Prime Minister Gentiloni of Italy to the annual meeting of the Leaders of the world’s seven major industrial democracies.

His participation came after almost a year spent working as a Policy Advisor at the Office of the Italian Prime Minister, where Davide was hired as part of a team set up for Italy’s G7 Presidency of 2017. Within this group, Davide is overseeing all global economy and international trade issues at the Summit level. In this capacity, he assisted the Italian Sherpa – the Prime Minister’s personal representative and lead negotiator for the G7 Summit – in negotiating the global economy and trade sections of this year’s G7 Leaders’ communiqué, which was then adopted by the G7 Heads of State and of Government in Taormina.

“The year 2017 has been a crucial one for global governance, and particularly so for the G7,” Davide said. “The present geopolitical landscape is characterized by high political and policy uncertainties. In addition, citizens – especially in advanced economies – are increasingly skeptical of their governments’ abilities to deliver on issues that affect their daily lives, ranging from security to environmental sustainability to economic well-being”. 

“Against this backdrop,” Davide added, “we identified the mission of the Italian G7 Presidency as ‘Building the Foundations of Renewed Trust’. We mean trust among countries, as well as of citizens towards institutions.” However, these were not the only challenges Davide and his team were confronted with: “The G7 Summit in Taormina featured many Heads of State and of Government who were participating for the first time in such a meeting, and some of them had never even met before. This raised concerns as to whether the ‘like-mindedness’ that had characterized the G7 since its inception would be preserved.”

Looking back, Davide is satisfied with the outcome of the discussions in Taormina. “Despite the many challenges we were facing, the desire to cooperate eventually prevailed. Changes in governments, as well as in their policies and views, are part of a democratic process. Even where our views differed considerably, we eventually managed to find common ground.”

Davide started working at the Prime Minister’s Office just prior to his graduation from the Graduate Institute in September 2016, after spending the last semester of his Master’s as a policy trainee in the Office of the Secretary-General of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris.

Davide came to know about the Graduate Institute while doing an internship at the Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN) of the European Commission in Brussels. “The Graduate Institute has a very good reputation in policy circles, and especially so in the European institutions. During my time at the European Commission, I had the chance to speak with alumni from the Institute who were working there, and who shared their experiences. I was thrilled by the idea of enrolling in a program that combined a rigorous training in economics with an emphasis on real-life, policy issues – as the MIS Economics eventually turned out to be. The Master’s thesis I wrote under the supervision of Professor Ugo Panizza focused on exchange rates, monetary policy and capital flows.”

In addition to his Master’s in International Economics from the Graduate Institute, Davide holds a Bachelor’s in Economics and Management from Bocconi University in Milan (Italy), as part of which he spent an Erasmus exchange semester at Sciences Po Paris. During his undergraduate studies, he also took a summer course on international political economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.