GOODBYE WASHINGTON CONSENSUS, HELLO WASHINGTON CONFUSION (original) (raw)

L 8 Reforming the Reforms of the Washington Consensus

2005

atin America lived through a period of deep economic reforms during the 1990s, framed by the so-called “Washington Consensus”. Dramatic changes affected the relative importance of the state, which saw its sphere of action limited amidst deregulation, massive privatisation, the reduction of public investment and expenditure, giving broader space for the working of private agents. Reforms were conducted under pressures from international financial institutions, some governments (particularly that of the US) and economists following the recipe, in strong fashion, of a neo-liberal approach. It was the time of the supposed “end of history”, with a naive interpretation that there was a unique road to a market economy in a globalising world that drastically limited the room for choice. Broadly speaking, Latin American countries were the more active implementers of neo-liberal reforms. Nearly one and a half decade of intensive and profound reforms has left a mix of successes and failures, w...

The rise and fall of the Washington Consensus as a paradigm for developing countries

World Development, 2000

Ð The introduction of the Washington Consensus involved not simply a swing from state-led to market-oriented policies, but also a shift in the ways in which development problems were framed and in the types of explanation through which policies were justi®ed. Key changes were the partial globalization of development policy analysis, and a shift from historicism to ahistorical performance assessment. The main challenge to this approach is a latent Southern Consensus, which is apparent in the convergence between East Asian developmentalism and Latin American neostructuralism. The demise of the Washington Consensus is inevitable because its methodology and ideology are in contradiction. Ó

On the Philosophical, Political, and Methodological Underpinnings of Reform We are grateful to

Hebbel for their very insightful comments. We are also grateful to the participants in the Understanding Reform Workshop. Several developing and transition countries implemented policy and institutional reforms in the last quarter of a century. Since the late seventies, and specially in the eighties and nineties, there has been a widespread move toward more market-oriented policies and institutions, particularly in Latin America, South and East Asia, the former Soviet Union and the former socialist economies of Eastern Europe. The scope of the first rounds of market-friendly reforms was rather limited in light of what is understood by reform today. In the late seventies, policy initiatives mostly focused on the "liberalization" of the financial and trade sectors. In the eighties, under the aegis of what would later be known as the Washington Consensus (WC) view, the list of policy recommendations on the agenda significantly enlarged, encompassing trade, capital account, in...

Capital, Trade, and the Political Economies of Reform

Existing approaches to the study of economic reform have focused on the mobilization of special interests that oppose liberalization and have tended to assume that reform dynamics follow a similar logic across distinct policy arenas. Analysis of the dynamics of capital account and trade liberalization in 19 Latin American countries between 1985 and 1999 demonstrates otherwise. Movement toward liberalization is shaped systematically by the timing and salience of each reform's distributional costs and partisan political dynamics. In turn, the timing and magnitude of costs are mediated by the economic context, while salience depends on the informational environment. Our findings thus differ from the conventional wisdom on several scores, particularly by emphasizing the ways in which good rather than bad economic conditions can facilitate reforms, the conditionality of legislative politics of reform enactment on whether reforms are characterized by ex ante conflict or fears of ex post blame, and how the type of reform shapes its political dynamics.

Patterns and Determinants of Economic Reform

2000

The objectives of the Consulting Assistance on Economic Reform (CAER II) project are to contribute to broad-based and sustainable economic growth and to improve the policy reform content of USAID assistance activities that aim to strengthen markets in recipient countries. Services are provided by the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) and its subcontractors. It is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, Bureau for