What Should the World Bank Think about the Washington Consensus?

Abstract

The phrase "Washington Consensus" has become a familiar term in development policy circles in recent years, but it is now used in several different senses, causing a great deal of confusion. In this article the author distinguishes between his original meaning as a summary of the lowest common denominator of policy advice addressed by the Washingtonbased institutions (including the World Bank) and subsequent use of the term to signify neoliberal or market-fundamentalist policies. He argues that the latter policies could not be expected to provide an effective framework for combating poverty but that the original advice is still broadly valid The article discusses alternative ways of addressing the confusion. It argues that any policy manifesto designed to eliminate poverty needs to go beyond the original version but concludes by cautioning that no consensus on a wider agenda currently exists. Ten years ago I invented the term "Washington Consensus" to refer to the lowest common denominator of policy advice being addressed by the Washington-based institutions to Latin American countries as of 1989 (Williamson 1990). While it is jolly to become famous for coining a term that reverberates around the world, I have long been doubtful about whether my phrase served to advance the cause of rational economic policymaking. My initial concern was that the phrase invited the interpretation that the liberalizing economic reforms of the past two decades were imposed by Washington-based institutions (for example, see Stewart 1997) rather than having resulted from the process of intellectual convergence that I believe underlies the reforms. 1 Richard Feinberg's "universal convergence" (in Williamson 1990) or Jean Waelbroeck's "one-world consensus" (Waelbroeck 1998) would have been a much better term for the intellectual convergence that I had in mind. I have gradually developed a second and more significant concern, however. I find that the term has been invested with a meaning that is significantly different from that which I had intended and is now used as a synonym for what is often called

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“…Governments have not always reciprocated and the twentieth century was filled with a range of grand experiments in which governments directed, regulated, or otherwise intervened in their economies. However, from the 1980s to the mid-1990s, there was a general consensus (referred to as the "Washington Consensus"), expressed in the policies of international financial institutions and adopted by many governments, that economic growth depended on macroeconomic stability and market liberalization, rather than state interventions (Williamson, 1990(Williamson, , 2000. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and donor nations emphasized the need for countries to avoid large national deficits, reform taxes, shift public expenditure patterns, privatize state-owned enterprises, and deregulate financial markets.…”

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