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15 Law & Bus. Rev. Am. 7 (2009)
A Short History of the Washington Consensus

handle is hein.journals/lbramrca15 and id is 9 raw text is: A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WASHINGTON CONSENSUS' John Williamson* I. INTRODUCTION HE term Washington Consensus was coined in 1989. The first written usage was in my background paper for a conference that the Institute for International Economics convened in order to ex- amine the extent to which the old ideas of development economics that had governed Latin American economic policy since the 1950s were be- ing swept aside by the set of ideas that had long been accepted as appro- priate within the OECD. In order to try and ensure that the background papers for that conference dealt with a common set of issues, I made a list of ten policies that I thought more or less everyone in Washington would agree were needed more or less everywhere in Latin America, and la- beled this the Washington Consensus. Little did it occur to me that fifteen years later I would be asked to write about the history of a term that had become the center of fierce ideological controversy. The first section of this paper describes what I recollect about the back- ground to my background paper for the 1989 conference. The second section retraces much more familiar ground, summarizing the ten points that I included in the Washington Consensus. This is followed by an ac- count of the reception given to the term, and the analysis. The next sec- tion tries to account for the fact that the term became used in such different ways in different quarters and thus to be at the center of ideo- logical controversies. The last substantive section is forward-looking and describes what I believe needs to be added to my original list in order to formulate a policy agenda for Latin America today. BACKGROUND The story started in the Spring of 1989 when I was testifying before a Congressional committee in favor of the Brady Plan. I argued that it * Senior Fellow, Institute for International Economics 1. Paper commissioned by Fundaci6n CIDOB for a conference From the Washing- ton Consensus towards a new Global Governance, Barcelona, September 24-25, 2004. The paper is reprinted with the permission of the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics which owns the copyright rights of all of its fellows. The institute is a private, nonpartisan, institution devoted to the study of economic policy and is one of the only economic think tanks considered to be nonpartisan by the press and neutral by the U.S. Congress.