What Happened to the Washington Consensus?

The phrase, ‘The Washington Consensus’ was, so the story goes, coined by John Williamson at a conference in response to the suggestion that, during the 1980s, countries in Latin America were being confronted with conflicting, and therefore confusing, advice from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Williamson’s response was that there was, in fact, a strong consensus about policy across the Washington-based institutions around the need for macroeconomic stability, microeconomic liberalisation and openness. Their advice was therefore not conflicting but reinforcing.