Fifteen years ago I had the privilege of being a student of the late Alice Amsden. We were reading her working manuscript for what was to become her opus book, The Rise of the Rest: Challenges to the West from Late Industrializing Economies. That book showed how, borrowing from the West, the most successful developing countries mixed government policy with market forces to transform their economies from rural ones to global export powerhouses. Her book echoed and was echoed by superscholars such as Peter Evans, Dani Rodrik and Robert Wade to name but a few. I dedicate this book to Alice's memory. She passed away, too early, while the manuscript was under preparation.

At the time of Amsden's class I was writing a dissertation on the United States' trade policy, looking specifically at the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Week after week as we analyzed scholarship about these policies that were so successful in East Asia and beyond I kept saying to myself, “Hey, you couldn't do that under NAFTA.”

Over the course of the first decade of the new century then, while working on a different core research agenda I slowly chipped away conducting in-depth analyses examining the extent to which emerging market and developing nations could use specific policies that had been used by others. At first, such analyses were often engagements with the legal literature, pinpointing policies and examining whether new laws and codes would still permit them.