This book is the product of 15 years of thinking about and working on issues of fiscal authority, federalism, and centralization, and I have incurred numerous debts to many institutions and individuals. I first became interested in these topics in 1990 while a researcher at the Centro de Investigación para el Desarrollo (CIDAC), a think tank in Mexico City. At the time, it was hard to imagine the types of transformations that Mexico would go through in the coming years. The director of CIDAC, Luis Rubio, had the keen insight that the country was not going to be isolated from the globalization and democratization processes sweeping the world or from the radical transformations that were taking place in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He inspired me and a cohort of young social scientists to study those transformations from a political economy perspective. Over the years, I have learned so much from all my colleagues at CIDAC, but on the topics of this book in particular, especially from Roberto Blum, Edna Jaime, Claudio Jones, Jacqueline Martinez, Olivia Mogollon, and Luis Rubio.

At CIDAC, I worked for a team that prepared a book that assessed the implications for Mexico's future of a Free Trade Agreement with the United States, years before NAFTA came into effect in 1994. I wrote a chapter analyzing the patterns of intraindustrial and interindustrial trade in Mexico and assessed the risks of regional polarization and growth divergence that could result from such an agreement.