Keynesian Economic Cooperation in "Crisis" : the OECD in the 1970s

This contribution analyzes one of the OECD's neo-liberal inflection during the second half of the 1970s: the McCracken Report (OECD 1977) mandated by US administration. This study of McCracken report gives us a better understanding of how the OECD contributed to the «Washington consensus», a policy consensus which has until now mainly been studied in the context of the IMF and the World Bank. Our inquiry is based on archives and on retrospective interviews. It focuses on the writing of this emblematic report by a collective formed of the direction of the OECD as well as external experts. I show how, during the elaboration of the report, economic policy recipes labeled as Keynesian, were discussed, debated and partly discredited by other forms of economics knowledge linked with supply-side approach. Besides I show how this evolution of expertise inside the OECD was defined as both an «innovation» and an intellectual «necessity» and how this expertise tended, with caution and uncertainty, to avoid any deep and alternative reflections and solutions about the decline of the international monetary system designed at Bretton Woods. I also underscore the struggles that emerged within the OECD's bureaucracy regarding the explanation of this epistemic and political evolution. This paper retraces not only conflicts between the different services of the organization, but also the direct or undirect intervention of member countries representatives in the elaboration of the report, as well as the transformation of the centre of gravity of North American economics in the 1970's.