Synopsis
This book is part of a larger effort undertaken by the World Bank to understand the development experience of the 1990s, an extraordinary eventful decade. Each of the project's three volumes serves a different purpose. 'Development Challenges in the 1990s: Leading Policymakers Speak from Experience' offers insights on the practical concerns faced by policymakers, while 'At the Frontlines of Development: Reflections from the World Bank' considers the operational implications of the decade for the World Bank as an institution. This volume, 'Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of Reform', provides comprehensive analysis of the decade's development experience and examines the impact of key policy and institutional reforms of growth. 'Economic Growth in the 1990s' confirms and builds on the conclusions of an earlier World Bank book, 'The East Asian Miracle' (1993), which reviewed experiences of highly successful East Asian economies. It confirms the importance of growth of fundamental principles: macro stability, market forces governing the allocation of resources, openness, and the sharing of the benefits of growth. At the same time, it echoes the finding that these principles translate into diverse policy and institutional paths, implying the economic policies and policy advice must be country-specific and institutional-sensitive if they are to be effective. The authors examine the impact of growth of key policy and institutional reforms: macroeconomic stabilization, trade liberalization, deregulation of finance, privatization, deregulation of utilities, modernization of the public sector with a view to increasing its effectiveness and accountability, and the spread of democracy and decentralization. They draw lessons both from a policy and institutional perspective and from the perspective of country experiences about how reforms in each policy and institutional area have affected growth.
Review
"The debate now is not over whether the Washington Consensus is dead or alive, but over what will replace it. An important marker in this intellectual terrain is the World Bank's Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of Reform (2005). With its emphasis on humility, policy diversity, selective and modest reforms, and experimentation, this is a rather extraordinary document demonstrating the extent to which the thinking of the development policy community has been transformed over the years." --Prof. Dani Rodrik, Journal of Economic Literature, November 2006, Professor of International Political Economy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
"The World Bank's Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of Reformis one of a spate of recent attempts at making sense of the facts of the last decade and a half, and probably the most intelligent. In fact, it is a rather extraordinary document insofar as it shows how far we have come from the original Washington Consensus...a useful and important document." --Prof. Dani Rodrik, Review, Journal of Economic Literature, December 2006
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