Neo-liberalism and East Asia: Resisting the Washington Consensus

This article examines current debates over the future direction of the reform agenda in post-crisis East Asia and sets them in the broader context of the global debate on the role of ideas and ideology in shaping economic policy-making. It argues that the contest of ideas in economic policy-making can evolve independently of their intellectual merit and empirical credibility and political interests play an important role. In the case of post-crisis East Asia, re-igniting the 'economic miracle' of the pre-crisis era does not stem from a politically neutral, dispassionate and intellectually rigorous analysis of what went wrong in the recession-inducing 1997 financial crisis that engulfed the region. It represents an attempt to reinvent orthodoxy in the domain of economic ideas and ideology by the global policy community that is in turn influenced by US-centric institutions.