The Washington Consensus: Assessing a Damaged Brand - Working Paper 213

Nancy Birdsall

No 213, Working Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: In this paper we analyze the Washington Consensus, which at its original formulation reflected views not only from Washington but also from Latin America. We trace the life of the Consensus from a Latin American perspective in terms of evolving economic development paradigms. We document the extensive implementation of Consensus-style reforms in the region as well as the mismatch between reformers’ expectations and actual outcomes, in terms of growth, poverty reduction, and inequality. We then present an assessment of what went wrong with the Washington Consensus-style reform agenda, using a taxonomy of views that put the blame, alternatively, on (i) shortfalls in the implementation of reforms combined with impatience regarding their expected effects; (ii) fundamental flaws—in either the design, sequencing, or basic premises of the reform agenda; and (iii) incompleteness of the agenda that left out crucial reform needs, such as volatility, technological innovation, institutional change and inequality.

Keywords: Stabilization; reform; financial markets; macroeconomic policy; government; history of economic thought; institutions; Latin America; Caribbean (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B25 E63 N16 N26 N46 P11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2010-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac and nep-pke
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/1424155/
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/1424155/ [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/1424155/)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cgd:wpaper:213

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Center for Global Development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Publications Manager ().