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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 04/05
A Short History of the Washington Consensus
John Williamson
September 2004
Abstract
The 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 examine the extent to which the old ideas of development economics that had governed Latin American economic policy since the 1950s were being swept aside by the set of ideas that had long been accepted as appropriate 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 labeled 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 background 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 account of the reception given to the term, and the analysis. The next section 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 ideological 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.
