During the heyday of the lsquo;Washington Consensus' in the 1980s and 1990s, the Japanese government became an increasingly vocal critic of its market-liberalizing prescriptions. Drawing on documents produced by the Japanese development bureaucracy, this paper analyses the origins of the...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is famous for its practice of conditionality-making the disbursement of resources to national governments contingent on the performance of certain policies. We survey the history of conditionality and show that the IMF is only one of many organizations that...

The dominance of free markets around the world is the defining feature of contemporary globalization. This current state of affairs is historically linked to the Washington Consensus, a coordinated campaign for the global diffusion of market-oriented policies that started more than 30 years ago....