The Political Economy of Reform and Development of the Washington Consensus

Alshyab, Nooh (2013): The Political Economy of Reform and Development of the Washington Consensus.

Abstract

The beginning of the 1980s represented for many developing countries a particularly critical period. To escape economic and financial difficulties, these countries had to engage into economic and political reforms, often under the umbrella of international institutions. Such circumstances offered the chance to collect a wide range of comparable reform experiences and represented thus a big lab for testing existing theories on stability, growth, and development. Focussing on the reform experiences of the 1980s and 1990s, this paper analyses their underlying economic wisdom and tries, according to their main results, to extrapolate some guidelines for reform. Overall, the analysis points at the need for a tailored approach to reform, which takes into account a country’s peculiarities and its specific barriers to growth and development.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Economic reform theory, development economics, Washington Consensus
• Subjects: E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics > E6 - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook > E60 - General; F - International Economics > F5 - International Relations, National Security, and International Political Economy > F55 - International Institutional Arrangements

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