Preface

Summary

This volume contains the proceedings of a conference organised by the Centre for Economic Policy Research and held in La Coruña on 26 April 1996. The meeting was hosted by the Instituto de Estudios Económicos de Galicia, Pedro Barrié de la Maza. It was the final conference of the Centre for Economic Policy Research's programme ‘Market Integration, Regionalism and Global Economy (MIRAGE)’, which was funded by Grant Number 902–1265 from The Ford Foundation.

We are grateful to Julia Newcomb and Toni Orloff at CEPR and Higinio Guillemon Duch at Banco Pastor for logistical help with the conference and the volume, and to Barbara Docherty, who served as Production Editor. We are also grateful to Guillermo de la Dehesa, Richard Portes and Stephen Yeo for their support and encouragement for the conference. Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza provided excellent conference facilities and funding for the meeting. Finally, we should like to express our appreciation to the participants at the conference, whose contributions to the discussion and stimulating comments helped to make the conference and volume so interesting. The contributions to this volume demonstrate the richness of the MIRAGE research programme, whose objective was to analyse the process of regional integration accompanying changes in the global economy.