Dr John McCombie is Director of the Cambridge Centre for Economic and Public Policy, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge and Fellow in Economics, Downing College Cambridge. He is currently an editor of Spatial Economic Analysis and he was an editor of Regional Studies. His research interests include the study of national and regional growth disparities, EU regional policy, economic growth and the balance-of-payments constraint, and criticisms of the aggregate production function and conventional measures of the rate of technical progress. In 2007/8, he was a specialist advisor to the House of Lords European Union Sub-committee on Economic and Financial Affairs and International Trade, which examined EU regional policy. He has been an economic consultant to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. His most recent co-edited books are Issues in Finance and Monetary Policy, Palgrave Macmillan (2007), The European Union: Current Problems and Prospects, Palgrave Macmillan (2007), and Economic Growth. New Directions in Theory and Policy Edward Elgar (2007).