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Sign upThe innocuous doctrine that shapes boom and bust
David Lubin sets out his vision for emerging economies
Developing nations suffered financial crises for decades because of America’s free-market ‘fetishism’, according to economist and author David Lubin.
Lubin, Head of Emerging Market Economics at Citi was invited by the Wheeler Institute for Business and Development to discuss his new book Dance of the Trillions: Developing Countries and Global Finance. The book explores the destabilising effects of unrestricted capital flows to the developing world.
The US wields its influence through a neoliberal consensus on free-market principles, argues Lubin. The conceptual heart of the book is the Washington Consensus, which, according to Lubin, is a “shorthand for neoliberalism and for the idea that the market should be given an unrestricted capacity to allocate resources throughout the economy.”
The Washington Consensus
The Washington Consensus is a policy framework developed by British economist John Williamson. He coined the phrase in his 1989 book Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened?
The Consensus consisted of 10 policies aimed at giving developing countries’ policymakers the means, if they wished, to plug their economy into a newly globalising international economy.
