No Consensus on the Washington Consensus

Description

On local, national, and international levels, new forces have risen to challenge the Consensus and create alternatives.

Beginning in the 1980s, the “Washington Consensus” – the concept that free markets were the solution to poverty — dominated development theory, policy, and practice around the world.

Today, just as faith in deregulated markets has evaporated in the nightmare on Wall Street, so too is the long reign of market fundamentalism ending in the development arena. And a debate over the best route to development — a debate that was vibrant in the 1970s and earlier — has returned.

As chronicled in our book Development Redefined: How the Market Met Its Match , adverse impacts of World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization policies — and the arrogance and recalcitrance of those institutions — over these past decades have sparked public opposi tion around the world. This became even more widespread after their spectacular failure in the string of financial crises that wracked many Asian and Latin American countries, as well as Turkey and Russia, in the late 1990s.

Throughout Latin America, especially in Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, voters have ...

Original URL

http://www.ips-dc.org/articles/no_consensus_on_the_washington_consensus

http://www.ips-dc.org/articles/no_consensus_on_the_washington_consensus