The objective of this article is to provide a critical assessment of the emerging Post-Washington Consensus (PWC), as the new influential vision in the development debate. The authors begin by tracing the main record of the Washington Consensus, the set of neoliberal economic policies propagated largely by key Bretton Woods institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, that penetrated into the economic policy agendas of many developing countries from the late 1970s onwards. They then outline the main tenets of the PWC, emerging from the shortcomings of that record and the reaction it created in the political realm. The authors accept that the PWC, in so far as it influences the actual practice of key Bretton Woods institutions, provides an improvement over the Washington Consensus. Yet, at the same time, they draw attention to the failure of the PWC, as reflected in current policy practice, to provide a sufficiently broad framework for dealing with key and pressing development issues such as income distribution, poverty and self-sustained growth.

This paper provides a critical assessment of Turkey's economic performance under the neoliberal economic policies which have been instrumental in generating a profound transformation in its socioeconomic structure since 1980. The paper draws special attention to the government's loss of policy autonomy and the democratic deficit at the initial and implementation stages of this transformation. It then evaluates Turkey's economic performance on the basis of indicators with medium and long-term impacts, such as investment, saving, industrialization, unemployment, and income distribution. This assessment shows that the neoliberal model has failed to fulfill its promises, with the Turkish economy failing to achieve performance equal to that under the previous import-substitution strategy or in comparable countries. The paper then identifies the main problem areas confronting the economy: the current account deficit, the labor market, insufficient industrial progress and income distribution, and poverty. To solve these problems, it calls for both a radical rethinking of the neoliberal policy regime and for proactive state intervention to stimulate saving and investment as part of a new development strategy, giving primary importance to industrialization, employment creation, and more equitable income distribution.

Much of the recent debate on the labor market issues of developing countries has revolved around the interaction of the labor market with stabilization and structural adjustment policies, introduced mostly in conjunction with the IMF and the World Bank. In particular, there is a growing body of literature on the interaction between structural adjustment policies and employment performance in these countries.According to the dominant view in this literature, the favorable employment effects of these policies stem basically from the shift of industrial trade strategy from state-led import substitution towards market-based export orientation.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractThe main objective of this study is to propose an analytical framework to explain the major policy shifts that has characterized post-war Turkish economic development; divided into four phases, starting respectively in 1950, 1960, 1980, and 2001. Its main contribution is to incorporate external and internal factors into this framework within a broadly political economy perspective, attaching particular significance to the role of economic crises in moving from one phase to the other. While the role of external agents is identified as the main factor behind policy shifts, the role of domestic coalitions in support of policy regime in each phase is also recognized. Drawing attention to the role of state in the impressive recent growth of countries such as China, India, and Ireland, the paper argues that there is still room for the state taking on a developmental role. The paper recommends that Turkey follows a similar path by improving state capacity not only with respect to its regulatory role but also in more developmental spheres, encompassing its redistributive and transformative role on the basis of a domestically-determined industrialization strategy.

The problems that the Turkish economy faced during the September-December 2021 period, which attracted a great deal of attention at home and abroad, was in essence a currency crisis with far-reaching implications for almost all aspects of the political economy. As the Central Bank reduced its policy rate from 19 percent in September to 14 percent in December through successive monthly announcements, the Turkish Lira (TL) experienced an unprecedentedly sharp depreciation-should one say collapse?-from 8.30 TL to the US dollar (US$) at the beginning of September to 8.86, 9.55, and 13.36, at the beginning of the successive months, and continued to fall daily to 17.50 TL on 20 December with no sign of a slowdown in sight. 1 The government attempted to halt this fall by selling a total of around US $6 billion of Central Bank reserves during the 1-17 December period, but to no avail. After the announcement by the government of a new scheme-exchange rate protected time deposits (ERPTD)-on the evening of 20 December, there was a sharp fall in the dollar/TL parity to 13.05 TL the following day which has stabilized at around 13.50 TL since then.The new scheme was aimed at reducing the demand for foreign currency by increasing the attractiveness of the Lira. It was intended to protect TL time depositors with three-month, six-month, and one-year terms against the depreciation of the Lira by guaranteeing to compensate them fully (in TL) for depreciation over and above their interest earnings. Whether it was this scheme alone that facilitated this sharp fall remains a matter of conjecture. The most plausible explanation offered so far is that on that day, the Central Bank and public sector banks together sold a total of around US$7 billion dollars. It seems that swap agreements with a number of Gulf *The author is a retired member of the Department of Economics at the Middle East Technical University.