This book was written in the early morning. Most of the work coincided with a home renovation project, resulting in the best time for writing being early in the morning, before the work began.

It is the product of two previous projects. The first was the chapter on institutions and European economic development that was commissioned by Nick Crafts and Gianni Toniolo for their volume `Economic Growth in Europe since 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

In the general context of writing this section, I experimented for the first time with the interpretation of corporatist institutions and European integration as solutions to the coordination problems that needed to be overcome to initiate and sustain economic growth.

A seminar at Lund University, organized in conjunction with this project, allowed me to test these ideas and explore, with the help of authors of other papers, how they could be applied in different European countries.

[Excerpt from the text of the preface]