[2] In 1972 he was among the founders, with Paul Sylos Labini, of the University of Calabria in Rende (province of Cosenza), a campus on the Anglo-Saxon model to stimulate the growth of the South.

Thanks to the results achieved in the academia, in the 1960s he became economic adviser to Aldo Moro, coming into contact with the group of economists, including Giuliano Amato, Francesco Forte, Siro Lombardini, Giorgio Ruffolo, Franco Momigliano and Alessandro Pizzorno, who then gravitated around the Socialist deputy Antonio Giolitti.

Andreatta sanctioned the separation of the Bank of Italy by the Italian Ministry of the Treasury, and when in 1981 the P2 the scandal was revealed, he was adamant in removing officials and managers who appeared in the list seized from Licio Gelli.

With the onset of the scandal of the IOR of Roberto Calvi and Paul Marcinkus, Andreatta imposed the dissolution of the Banco Ambrosiano, ignoring political and media pressures.

Andreatta was throughout his career a promoter of a mixed economic system and between the pupils of his main school of thought the most important was Romano Prodi, which he sponsored as a guide for the center-left coalition after the fall of the first Berlusconi government in 1995.

After the fall of the Prodi government in 1998, he founded "Charter 14 June", an association which aimed to broaden the basis of democratic consensus and to reduce the power of parties.

[3][4][5] Andreatta's son Filippo, professor at the University of Bologna, writes for several Italian newspapers and has been a supporter of the Democratic Party, an idea also pursued by his father in his last years.