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Over the past twenty years a worldwide intellectual consensus on economic diagnosis and policy has emerged. The practical features of this consensus include stability-oriented fiscal and monetary policies, accessibility to trade, and openness to capital inputs and outputs. This consensus is the product of the influential role of U.S.-trained economists in policy-making and a result of the apparent failure of alternative models of economic management, especially the collapse of centrally planned economies and the shortcomings of import-substitution industrialization. The 1990s have been characterized by the triumph of both democracy and a Western economic model. The new orthodoxy involves an assumption that the same types of liberal or neo-liberal policies would be appropriate in a very wide range of economic and social settings. The Western economic model has not gone unchallenged, however. Alternative models are not only the remnants of a past vision of economic control or a nationalist response to economic universalism, but also the products of fundamental historical forces and ethical questions about the social consequences of free market capitalism. These alternatives are not purely of intellectual or academic interest. If they were to be widely accepted - and their appeal is growing - they would pose a threat to the economic liberalization and global integration that has been characteristic of the post-1945 period. The creation of substantial barriers to trade for the sake of an alternative approach to economics would be a threat to the continuing capacity of the world economy to promote growth and higher standards of living.
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http://www.princeton.edu/~hjames/pucourse/his555/main.shtml |