Refers to a basket of such neo-liberal economic policies as a wholesale move toward privatization of as many government functions as possible; devaluation of national currencies; elimination of barriers to currency convertibility; implementation of packages of deep austerity measures in an effort to balance national budgets; removal of state subsidies and price controls; renewed emphasis on agricultural production for export (in consonance with the theory of comparative advantage); removal of controls on trade and payments; and a reduction and rationalization of bureaucracies (see Biersteker 1990), all aimed at, ostensibly, to rescue PQD countries from the deadly grip of endemic widespread economic woes confronting many of them in recent years.[1] In reality their net effect was to benefit the continued domination—as well as its further deepening—of the PQD countries by transnational monopolies (most of whom are domiciled in the West). While it is true that advocacy of some of these measures was certainly a step in the right direction, when the package is taken as whole it has been a prescription for disaster. Why? A central component of the basis of the economic ills plaguing these countries is not addressed (and can not be addressed given the ideological underpinnings of the consensus): the web of Western-dominated international economic relations in which the PQD countries have been enmeshed for centuries ever since it was forged in the wake of 1492 (Columbian Project)—ranging from unnecessary heavy debt burdens to inequitable terms of trade; from unfair trade policies to resource squandering and environment degrading investment projects; from economically crippling extraction of investible surpluses to import-dependent investment enterprises.
[1]. The self-confessed father of the phrase “Washington Consensus” is one John Williamson, a senior fellow at the conservative (neoliberal) Washington-based think-tank, the Institute for International Economics. See his summary and discussion of the term as he defined it, together with a critique by others in the work edited by Auty and Toye (1996). See also Stiglitz (2002), and Kuczynski and Williamson (2003).