This book may be described both as a tribute to the memory of Professor Federico Caffé and as an outcome of reflections made in the 1980s about the way in which economists could help in the choice of better policies. In Western Europe the main problem to be faced was, of course, unemployment. As a government statistician, an occasional policy adviser and a theorist, I had to pay particular attention to the weakness of the diagnoses on which policies were based. I had then to reflect on the instruments and analytical arguments used at the diagnosis stage.

It was only natural for me to select topics from these reflections when I was asked to lecture, dealing on each occasion with aspects that seemed to deserve the attention of the audience concerned. Some of these lectures were later printed, but often not in widely accessible publications. This book provides an opportunity not only for reproducing the material but also for gathering it in such a way as to make its common purpose more apparent.

Actually the two Caffé Lectures, given at La Sapienza University in Rome, did aim at covering the full range of those recent reflections. They are published here for the first time, respectively as chapters 1 and 4. Three other chapters have appeared so far only in French (2, 3 and 5). Very few libraries are likely to hold both remaining chapters in their stacks at present.