Williamson reframed the Washington Consensus as core economic science rather than OECD practice

Evidence

Given all this, you might think that the limited success of “austerity in the Global South” would encourage a rethink of these policies. In one quarter, it did. The IMF’s sister institution the World Bank produced a report in 2005 that pretty much acknowledged the near total failure of the Washington Consensus checklist of reforms. But the IMF, echoing the classical liberal tradition, produced an evaluation the same year that argued the opposite. Indeed, according to the IMF report, the only thing that failed was, as ever, countries’ implementation of the reforms, which left the content of the reforms both unquestioned and untouched. — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 444 (#responds-to, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The Washington Consensus misrepresented actual practice of OECD states. — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 435; The Washington Consensus codified a ten-policy neoliberal agenda in 1989. — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 433; The Washington Consensus caricatures neoliberalism as a fixed policy recipe — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 160 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• The IMF blamed implementation failures rather than reforming its Washington Consensus policies #responds-to (0.75) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 444