Research Interests

When you started out you were working on the Yugoslav economy and issues related to the changes in East European planned economies. But by the time you went to Washington you were working on issues of competitiveness, industrial policy -- comparative but also very much focused on the United States. Tell us a little about that transition.

I was always interested in international issues, so much of the work I did on Eastern Europe was about its trade, about foreign investment, about its relationships with the International Monetary Fund, or about how it responded to its international debt crisis. So there was always an international component. The second thing is that I was interested in big national comparisons, like how countries compare on savings and investment rates, or how they handle inflation, or how they try to generate an economic system which supports low levels of unemployment. So you can ask these kinds of questions in any setting. You can ask them in a planned economy -- how do they do that? And you can ask them in England or France. So I started to teach more on these broad comparative issues. And I started to move out of just talking about the Soviet Union and Central Europe to talking about Western Europe, and then to Asia. I started doing some joint teaching with a colleague of mine, John Zysman, whom I had known in graduate school. He and I had been at MIT, he was in political science and I was in economics. We started to team teach, or teach one another's classes. He was very interested in Western Europe and that got me interested in thinking about these kinds of competitive comparisons among advanced industrial countries. And frankly, back when I made this transition, which was really in the early 1980s, it was still almost a decade before anything really started to happen in Central Europe and I was getting a little bored. I understood the problems (I think people did understand the problems), and basically in terms of solving economic problems there was just a tremendous political barrier to making any forward steps. So it was also lack of interest in what I had been doing.

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