Conditionality

News

IFIs macroeconomic policy “anti-growth”

21 November 2011

“Why have the policy tutors performed so miserably and the pupils so brilliantly?”, wondered professor John Weeks of the School of Oriental and African Studies in an October article for Social Europe Journal. He notes that developing countries who embraced the World Bank and IMF’s macroeconomic orthodoxy have fared the worst in recent crises, whereas those that have best weathered the storm have in common “exactly those sins/virtues absent in the ‘advanced’ countries: willingness to intervene with growth-enhancing policies”. Weeks cautions that advanced countries are now ready to apply “the neoliberal anti-growth Washington Consensus macro policies” at home.