Introduction: Neo-liberal Development Policy in Asia beyond the Post-Washington Consensus

Abstract

This paper introduces a special issue on contemporary neo-liberal development policy in Asia. The paper contextualises the current state of neo-liberal development policy as having moved beyond two earlier phases: one that intended to limit the state and unleash market forces and, subsequently, one that was oriented towards remaking the state in an idealised liberal market image. While building off its forebears, contemporary neo-liberal development policy – what we describe as “market building” – displays a new array of foci and modalities that not only continue to target the state as a site of reform (though often in novel ways) but which also regularly work around the state to directly cultivate private sector activity. Moreover, a product of its times, market building incorporates an increased emphasis upon risk and risk management, with risk to programme implementation and capital now central concerns within the neo-liberal agenda. However, just as with earlier phases of neo-liberalism, the market-building agenda is both subjected to and produces particular patterns of politics. As the papers in this special issue show, perhaps nowhere is this reality more interesting than in Asia, where new and emboldened patterns of accumulation are evident and, where too, nation-states are no longer as materially dependent on organisations such as the World Bank as before.

Key Words:

• Market building
• neo-liberalism
• post-Washington Consensus
• Washington Consensus

Notes

The papers stem from a workshop held at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore in April 2011. The workshop, part of a project entitled New Approaches to Building Markets in Asia, was funded by a Singapore Ministry of Education Tier 1 Academic Research Fund Grant of the same title.

The GNI figures arrived at here were manually calculated by the author using the World Bank's “World DataBank” tool. The figures are for 2009, are in “current US$” and were arrived at using the World Bank's own list of countries within its East Asia and the Pacific (EAaP) regional demarcation. The sub-regional per capita incomes were calculated by taking the total GNI for each country that the Bank has data for in the EAaP and dividing this by the corresponding figure for population. For certain countries (e.g. Brunei, North Korea, Myanmar, Timor-Leste and Tuvalu) within the region there is either incomplete or no data within the World DataBank for the time period covered. Therefore, the figures for these countries are not included in the above calculations.