Quadrio Cuzio graduated in political science in 1961 from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, where Professor Siro Lombardini was his thesis supervisor.

He has held teaching positions at the University of Cagliari, Sardinia (1965) and Bologna (1968–1975) where he became tenure track professor and dean of the Faculty of Political Science.

At Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, he was full professor of political economy (1976-2010), dean of the Faculty of Political Science (1989-2010) and director (1977-2010) of the Research Center of Economic Analysis and International Economic Development (CRANEC), which he founded in 1977, of which he is the chairman of the academic board since 2011, the same year he became a professor emeritus.

He has organized innumerable seminars, held lectures and conferences in many universities, academic and cultural institutions in Italy and abroad.

[9] In his youth, Alberto Quadrio Curzio, was a successful and talented alpine skier (in Bormio was trained by the Olympic champion Stefano Sertorelli).

Already since the second half of the 1960s, he has shown, through the use of multisector analytical methods, how changes in structural technologies and technical progress could depend both on income distribution with rents explicitly considered and on the achievement of a scarcity limit of some resource, or on the mix of the two mentioned elements.

c) The history of political economic thought, with particular reference to Italy, starting from concepts on Enlightenment developed around Cesare Beccaria, from the second half of the 1700s and subsequent extensions, up to more recent times, identifying a stream of thought which unites civil progress (of institutionalist economists) with technical-scientific progress (of engineering economists) in creative and sustainable development.

Studi in onore di Alberto Quadrio Curzio» - published by Il Mulino in 2012 with contributions from 32 of his colleagues (many of whom were once his students).

This book contains contributions by Mauro L. Baranzini, Claudia Rotondi, Roberto Scazzieri, Luigi L. Pasinetti, D'Maris Dalton Coffman, Heinz D. Kurz, Neri Salvadori, Piercarlo Nicola, Albert E. Steenge, Carlo D'Adda, Faye Duchin, Heinrich Bortis, Kumaraswamy Vela Velupillai, Michael A. Landesmann, Ivano Cardinale, Lilia Costabile, Constanze Dobler, Harald Hagemann, Alessandro Roncaglia, Stefano Zamagni, Pier Luigi Porta, Moshe Syrquin, Marco Fortis, Sunanda Sen, Andrea Goldstein, Keun Lee, Antonio Andreoni.