After the Washington Consensus: Restarting Growth and Reform in Latin America

This volume is a successor of sorts to an earlier study, Toward Renewed Economic Growth in Latin America (Institute for International Economics; 1986), which blazed the trail for the market–oriented economic reforms that were adopted in Latin America in the subsequent years. It again presents the work of a group of leading economists (*) who were asked to think about the nature of the economic policy agenda that the region should be pursuing after the better part of a decade that was punctuated by crises, achieved disappointingly slow growth, and saw no improvement in the region‘s highly skewed income distribution. It diagnoses the first–generation (liberalizing and stabilizing) reforms that are still lacking, the complementary second–generation (institutional) reforms that are necessary to provide the institutional infrastructure of a market economy with an egalitarian bias, and the new initiatives that are needed to crisis–proof the economies of the region to end its perpetual series of crises.

(*) Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (Minister of Finance of Peru), Nancy Birdsall (President, Center for Global Development), Miguel Szekely (Mexico), Ricardo Lopez Murphy (Argentina), Jaime Saavedra (Peru), Claudio de Moura Castro (Brazil), Liliana Rojas–Suarez (Peru), Andres Velasco (Harvard), and Roberto Bouzas (Argentina).

About the Author:

John Williamson, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, was economics professor at Pontif ca Universidade Cat lica do Rio de Janeiro (1978 81), University of Warwick (1970 77), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1967, 1980), University of York (1963 68), and Princeton University (1962 63). He also served as adviser to the International Monetary Fund (1972 74); and Economic Consultant to the UK Treasury (1968 70), and Chief Economist for the South Asia Region of the World Bank (1996–99). He has published numerous studies on international monetary and developing world debt issues, including Dollar Overvaluation and the World Economy (2003), Exchange Rate Regimes for Emerging Markets: Reviving the Intermediate Option (2000), The Crawling Band as an Exchange Rate Regime (1996), What Role for Currency Boards? (1995), Estimating Equilibrium Exchange Rates (1994), The Political Economy of Policy Reform (1993), Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened? (1990), and Targets and Indicators: A Blueprint for the International Coordination of Economic Policy with Marcus Miller (1987).