This compedium of essays brings together some of William Baumol's most distinguished and acclaimed papers with some that are more rare, including a discussion of the growth and innovation mechanism that accounts for the unprecedented growth performance of the market economies. Amongst many other papers of note are a discussion of appropriate regulatory principles for privatized and deregulated firms, and a survey of the accomplishments of economists in the past century and the past millennium. INDICE Part 1 On productivity, growth, the cost disease and scale economies: "Productivity Growth, Convergence and Welfare - What the Long-Run Data Show", American Economic Review, 76, 5, December 1986, 1072-85 "Entrepreneurship - Productive, Unproductive and Destructive", Journal of Political Economy, 98, 5, October 1990, 893-921 "Towards Microeconomics of Innovation - Growth Engine Hallmark of Market Economies", Atlantic Economic Journal, 30, 1, March 2002, 1-12 "On the Possibility of Continuing Expansion of Finite Resources", Kyklos, 39. 2, 1986, 167-79 "Social Wants and Dismal Science - The Curious Case of the Climbing Costs of Health and Teaching", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 137, 4, 1993, 612-37 "Unbalanced Growth Revisited - Asymptotic Stagnancy and New Evidence", Sue Anne Batey Blackman, Edward N. Wolff, American Economic Review, 75, 4, September 1985, 806-17 "Inefficient and Locally Stable Trade Equilibria Under Scale Economies - Comparative Advantage Revisited", Ralph E. Gomory, Kyklos, 49, 4, 1996, 509-40. Part 2 Industrial Organization, Regulation and Privatization: "Contestable Markets - An Uprising in the Theory of Industry Structure", American Economic Review, 72, 1, March 1982, 1-15 "On the Perils of Privatization", Eastern Economic Journal, 19, 4, Fall 1993, 419-40 "Predation and the Logic of the Average Variable Cost Test", Journal of Law and Economics, 39, 1, April 1996, 49-72 "Having Your Cake - How to Preserve Universal-Service Cross