This year marks the 200th anniversary of David Ricardo’s Theory of Comparative Advantage – in the words of Paul Samuelson, one of the few counter-intuitive fundamental ideas in economics, which moved the world away from mercantilism. And when we look at other giants in the history of economic thought, Adam Smith, who laid down the foundations of capitalism; Keynes, who drove us into policy activism and away from laissez-faire; until the founders of econometric model building in post-war time, we cannot but conclude that there is little in economics that does not have policy implications and that the interaction between research and its policy application is continuously evolving in an ever expanding universe.[…]