Introduction to the Regional Syntheses and Country Case Studies

The vast majority of countries in the world have undertaken ‘market-oriented reforms’ at some time over the last 25 years (or longer in several cases). Although this movement in favor of markets embraced both developed and developing countries, the changes in the developing world have been by far the most striking, especially those that occurred in the late eighties and early nineties. The reforms implemented during this period entailed a dramatic U-turn in the approaches to development that most regions had followed in the post-war period. In Latin America and India, policymakers turned away from entrenched beliefs about the merits of import substitution and state intervention; in Africa, one country after the other abandoned the view that the post-independence states should follow a socialist orientation; and the countries of the socialist bloc in Europe and Asia completely reshuffled their political institutions and external alliances with the explicit goal of establishing capitalism. At the height of the reform years the conviction naturally gathered momentum that a worldwide — and perhaps irreversible — process of convergence toward the establishment of market-friendly rules for the economic game was under way. Indeed, by the late eighties, this conviction was so strong that Williamson (1990) was able to codify good market-oriented policies under ten items — the so-called Washington Consensus (WC).