Claiming that there is only one possible economic policy to solve the problems of growth, employment, and inequality that all advanced democracies face today has become a normal practice among both our policymakers and the public. This book, which I actually started as an inquiry into the causes of a muchvaunted process of policy convergence in the industrialized world in the last two decades, turns out to contend the opposite. Even in a world of open and interdependent economies, it is still possible to detect widely divergent economic strategies, all of them linked to different political projects, spawning opposed outcomes. As a matter of fact, the accelerated technological change and the process of growing economic integration we are experiencing today are only sharpening the economic and political dilemmas confronted by all advanced nations. Perhaps paradoxically for some, they are intensifying the extent of divergence among the different economic strategies embraced by governments to respond to those dilemmas. And, as this book intends to show, they are probably increasing the autonomy of politics over the economy.

This book derives partly from the doctoral dissertation that I completed at Harvard University in 1994. I would like to express my gratitude to my three thesis advisers, Alberto Alesina, James E. Alt, and Peter A. Hall. Without their support, their comments, and their suggestions, which were informed by rather different intellectual traditions, this study would not have been possible. I also benefited from the questions and extremely stimulating comments by Jose Maria Maravall and discussions with Paul A. Beck.