If you want to understand how politics, institutions, and policy interact with each other to produce economic success or failure - not over the very long run when we are all dead, but in the shorter run that affects us all - there are few books that pack as much insight as this one. Brian Levy is a practitioner who can theorize as well as any scholar. But the real value added of this book is the practical and pragmatic approach it brings to institutional reform." Dani Rodrik, Albert Hirschman Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.