New Development Strategies: Beyond the Washington Consensus

Development economics became an independent field of study in the 1950s. Since then we have witnessed differing views on the relationship between (nation) states and their economic development (Meier and Rauch, 2000, p. 421). In the early days, states were optimistically presumed to be represented by social-welfare-maximizing governments, but then the pessimistic view emerged that states were one of the largest hindrances to development and served only to maximize the profits of selected interest groups, politicians and/or bureaucrats.