The Wall Street-Treasury-IMF Complex after Asia: Neo-liberalism in Decline?

Abstract

In recent years there has been a growing debate about the significance of a shift in orthodox development policy from the Washington Consensus of the 1980s to an emergent post-Washington Consensus (PWC). For some, this reflects a genuine move away from the free market fundamentalism of the 1990s towards a new focus on poverty, civil society and the institutional underpinnings of markets (Stiglitz 1998b). For the more pessimistic, it simply represents a new form of intervention that aims radically to re-work societies in the image of neo-liberal capitalism (Best 2003; Cammack 2004b). What is clear is that the new agenda is still strongly market-focused (Fine 2000), but also far more wide-ranging and complex than the ‘high neo-liberalism’ of the 1980s, recognising that markets are underpinned by social and even authoritarian institutions.