Ban, Cornel and Mark Blyth

Abstract
Over the past two decades, the spread of ideas and policies associated with the Washington Consensus has captured the attention of political economists. As a systemic feature of the global economy, this process of diffusion has merited such scholarly attention. However, the systemic shock of the Great Recession has called into question the oft-noted convergence of rising economic powers such as Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRICs), along with their supposed relationship to the Washington Consensus policy paradigm. Indeed, the crisis has brought to the fore the question of whether the BRICs have ‘grown apart’ from both the ideas and the policies prepared for them by Washington-based institutions. To date, there has been no systematic scholarly effort aimed at analysing the spread of Washington Consensus ideas and policies in relation to the rise of the BRICs.
This special issue attempts to fill this gap through six contributions that bring together scholars interested in the political economy of development and the sociology of ideational and institutional change. Their main finding is that the BRICs attempted to balance their adoption of select parts of the Washington Consensus template while defending and often reinventing the relevance of state-led development policies under the guise of being compliant with the Washington Consensus itself. In so doing, they have neither pioneered a post-neoliberal transformation, nor have they proved to be simply forces for the continuation of Washington Consensus ideas and policies in the global economy.
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