Since the early eighties, increasing numbers of states worldwide have adopted neoliberal policies of privatization, deregulation, and fi.nancialization. Some of them have done so on their own (or, more accurately, as a response to pressures from ruling financial elites seeking to restore their class power). Others have been compelled by international institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to remove price controls, accept inferior terms of trade, and dism�ntle their public sectors as a condition for aid and loans. Previously committed to a view of development emphasizing the managerial role of the state, these institutions came in the late seventies and early eighties to be dominated by the Washington Consensus, the conviction that neoliberalism provided the quickest and surest formulae for growth. Structural adjustment policies involving cuts to state budgets and programs for the poor were thus instituted throughout the Second and Third Worlds to encourage the development of markets (or to eliminate barriers to the flow of capital and capacity outside countries to more profitable investment sites). The former Soviet Union likewise underwent "shock treatments" as its stateowned and controlled economy was rapidly privatized.
By the end of the twentieth century, neoliberalism had replaced Keynesianism as the reigning approach to the economy; the state, and development.17 As Robert Polin observes: "The neoliberal economic agenda-of eliminating government deficits and inflation, sharply cutting back government spending, deregulating labor and financial markets, and opening national economies to free trade and multinational capital investments- has become so dominant throughout the world over the past generation that even thinkg through serious alternatives presents itself as a daunting task."18 The charge led by Margaret Thatcher as she dismantled the British welfare state and defeated the trade unions in the name of increasing competition now prevails as the common sense of neoliberal ideology-There Is No Alternative.
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