This book focuses on the structural changes in private enterprises and public institutions that aim at lifting the continental productive system onto a higher growth path. Organized along three research lines, the chapters offer new, provocative treatments of the adjustments in monetary and real sectors accompanying the European economic integration, the consequences of specific legal/institutional changes, and national systems of technological and institutional innovation. Given the fundamental changes of policy regimes involved, only a comparative (to some extent, eclectic) conceptual framework may provide insights about the ultimate economic state eventually reached and the manifold of processes leading towards it. The unifying feature of the book lies in its attempt to highlight the complementary roles of private and public sectors in promoting technology, human capital and institutional engineering as the ingredients in any successful recipe for growth and convergence.