Abandon the Washington Consensus, forge the Istanbul Consensus http://www.tni.org/article/abandon-washington-consensus-forge-istanbul-consensus

The world has had more than enough of the Washington Consensus. It’s time to impose an Istanbul Consensus based on common sense, low-cost solutions, public honesty and simple justice and give the people of the LDCs, at last, a chance.Washington Consensus policies induce no such results. Indeed, the only successful former “third world” societies, from South Korea to China, that have emerged from underdevelopment made the transition using policies exactly opposite to those insisted upon by neoliberal Bank/Fund economists.

They interfered with markets as a matter of course, using subsidies, wage and price controls, high tariff barriers, massive public investment in education and so on.

In contrast, the LDCs have, at best, remained where they were a decade ago. More often their situation has become worse and their number has doubled to 48. The Millennium Development Goals will not be met by the 2015 deadline; on present trends we would need 100 years to reduce hunger by half. Nor have these countries “grown out of debt” as the Consensus promised they would. The LDCs as a group have not emerged from crippling debt: they are still paying their creditors, public and private, $11.400 every minute in debt service.