ROME: Robert Mundell, the Nobel Prize-winner and acclaimed economist who was considered the intellectual father of the euro, has died. He was 88., according to media reports.

Hours after the news of Mundell's death broke on Monday, it was a top news story in most major Italian media outlets.

A Columbia University professor of economics, Mundell won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1999 for his theory that flexible markets, including the free movement of labor and capital, are necessary for a single-currency zone to succeed. His research helped lay the foundation for the euro, set up by 11 European governments earlier that year.

Mundell, who was born in Canada, was at his vacation home near the Tuscan city of Siena when he died on Sunday, though the news was not immediately reported, reports Xinhua news agency.

Mundell won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1999 for what the Nobel Committee referred to as "his analysis of monetary and fiscal policy under different exchange rate regimes and his analysis of optimum currency areas".

He is best known for laying the groundwork for the euro starting in the 1960s, publishing articles that created the foundation for the European Economic and Monetary Union, the legal and economic framework that the currency is based on.

According to a profile on Mundell by the International Monetary Fund, the economist was "a pioneer of modern international economics" who "developed the modern theory of optimal currency areas, and many observers include him among the fathers of the euro".

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