The Brussels-Frankfurt-Washington Consensus. Old and New Tradeoffs in Economics

Abstract

The application of the policies prescribed by the Washington Consensus in developing countries is the subject of a vast literature. What is much less known is that there exist only one pure laboratory experiment implementing the Washington Consensus in the western world: Europe. The aim of this paper is to show that Europe has gone very far in the internalisation of the Washington Consensus; in fact, it has devised constitutionally a form of government that has no choice but to implement it. What appears then clearly is that this attempt was not a success story (.).