During my 7 1/2 years of service in the 1990s as deputy secretary general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, I initiated a research project that produced, in 1997, a report titled "The World in 2020: Toward a New Global Age." In the course of this research I assumed that the 21st-century world economy would evolve into a tripolar structure comprising an enlarging European Union, an expanding North American free-trade area and a dynamically developing Asian economic zone.