...Washington Consensus The term was first coined by John Williamson in 1989, an economist from the institute for international economics in Washington, D.C. Williamson used the term to summarize policy advice from Washington based institutions such as the US treasury, the IMF and the World Bank, that were believed to be necessary for the recovery of countries in Latin America from the economic and financial crises in the 1980s. The Washington Consensus is a set of 10 policies that the US treasury, the IMF and the World Bank believed were necessary elements of “first stage policy reform” that all countries should adopt to increase economic growth. At its heart is an emphasis on the importance of macroeconomic stability and integration into the international economy - in other words a neo-liberal view of globalization. The framework included: * Fiscal discipline - strict criteria for limiting budget deficits * Public expenditure priorities - moving them away from subsidies and administration towards previously neglected fields as key pro-growth like primary education, primary health care and infrastructure invest. * Tax reform - broadening the tax base and cutting marginal tax rates * Financial liberalization - interest rates should ideally be market-determined * Exchange rates - should be managed to induce rapid growth in non-traditional exports * Trade liberalization: liberalization of imports, eliminating quantitative restrictions (licensing etc...
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...in 1940-1960 after which there has been a shift from physical to human capital in 1970. But what is more important is the period since 1980 when the heyday of developmental economics brought shift to market liberalism, structural adjustment, institutional economics and the shift towards Washing Consensus. In the years of transition from command economies to market economies in 1990’s in many countries it was a tendency to implement policies supported by the framework of Washington Consensus and starting this millennium what has mostly been happening is the reaction to failures of Washington Consensus and ongoing experimentations that are targeted to find some answers to the everlasting problem of how to reduce poverty and enhance economic growth. Many of these one-fits-all policy prescriptions failed to prove their efficiency or that they are working at all and, moreover, it is not uncommon that they were even the causes of many financial crises or economics slowdowns in different counties. So in my work I want to face the theoretical analysis and empirical observations to shed the light on the importance, efficiency as well as the limitations of the phenomenon of Washington Consensus, which was called to be a triumph of the transition to...
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...A Short History of the Washington Consensus John Williamson Senior Fellow, Institute for International Economics Paper commissioned by Fundación CIDOB for a conference “From the Washington Consensus towards a new Global Governance,” Barcelona, September 24–25, 2004. The term “Washington Consensus” was coined in 1989. The first written usage was in my background paper for a conference that the Institute for International Economics convened in order to examine the extent to which the old ideas of development economics that had governed Latin American economic policy since the 1950s were being swept aside by the set of ideas that had long been accepted as appropriate within the OECD. In order to try and ensure that the background papers for that conference dealt with a common set of issues, I made a list of ten policies that I thought more or less everyone in Washington would agree were needed more or less everywhere in Latin America, and labeled this the “Washington Consensus.” Little did it occur to me that fifteen years later I would be asked to write about the history of a term that had become the center of fierce ideological controversy. The first section of this paper describes what I recollect about the background to my background paper for the 1989 conference. The second section retraces much more familiar ground, summarizing the ten points that I included in the Washington Consensus. This is followed by an account of the reception given to the term, and the analysis....
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...Williamson said the Washington Consensus was originally formulated not as a policy prescription for development, but was a lists of policies that were widely held in Washington in 1989 that were desirable for implementation in Latin America. He noted there were other development policies that he thought were useful, but were not included in the Washington Consensus since they did not enjoy widespread support. He suggested the Washington Consensus had three different meanings. First, was his original list of ten specific policy reforms. The second understanding was that the Consensus was a set of economic policies advocated for developing countries in general by official Washington, such as the IMF, Bank and US Treasury Department. These policies augmented the original policies advocated by Williamson, and emphasized institutional reforms. The third meaning was espoused by critics of the IMF and Bank who suggested these were policies imposed on client countries, and were an attempt to minimize the role of the state. Williamson criticized the third view as one not grounded in fact. In retrospect, he added that he was wishful in his thinking about a consensus on the issue exchange rate policies. He was also strongly critical of the IMF’s move to rapidly dismember capital controls in Asia during the financial crisis of the late 1990’s. Williamson then discussed the ten policy reforms of the Consensus. First, was that budget deficits should be small enough be financed without recourse...
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...Washington Consensus The term was first coined by John Williamson in 1989, an economist from the institute for international economics in Washington, D.C. Williamson used the term to summarize policy advice from Washington based institutions such as the US treasury, the IMF and the World Bank, that were believed to be necessary for the recovery of countries in Latin America from the economic and financial crises in the 1980s. The Washington Consensus is a set of 10 policies that the US treasury, the IMF and the World Bank believed were necessary elements of “first stage policy reform” that all countries should adopt to increase economic growth. At its heart is an emphasis on the importance of macroeconomic stability and integration into the international economy - in other words a neo-liberal view of globalization. The framework included: * Fiscal discipline - strict criteria for limiting budget deficits * Public expenditure priorities - moving them away from subsidies and administration towards previously neglected fields as key pro-growth like primary education, primary health care and infrastructure invest. * Tax reform - broadening the tax base and cutting marginal tax rates * Financial liberalization - interest rates should ideally be market-determined * Exchange rates - should be managed to induce rapid growth in non-traditional exports * Trade liberalization: liberalization of imports, eliminating quantitative restrictions (licensing...
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...Bibliography: Adedeji, A. (1999). "Structural adjustment policies in Africa." International Social Science Journal 51(162): 521-528. Broad, R. and J. Cavanagh (1999). "The death of the Washington consensus?" World Policy Journal 16(3): 79-88. Cleary, S. (1989). "Structural Adjustment in Africa." Trocaire Development Review 1989: 41-59. Dollar, D. and A. Kraay (2001). Trade, growth, and poverty, World Bank, Development Research Group, Macroeconomics and Growth. Escobar, A. (1992). "Culture, economics, and politics in Latin American social movements theory and research." The making of social movements in Latin America: Identity, strategy, and democracy: 65-82. Fine, B. (2002). "Economics imperialism and the new development economics as Kuhnian paradigm shift?" World Development 30(12): 2057-2070. Godard, P.-P. K. and J. H. Williamson (2003). After the Washington Consensus: restarting growth and reform in Latin America, Peterson Institute. Gore, C. (2000). "The rise and fall of the Washington Consensus as a paradigm for developing countries." World Development 28(5): 789-804. Hamilton, C. (1989). "The irrelevance of economic liberalization in the Third World." World Development 17(10): 1523-1530. Harriss, J., et al. (2003). The new institutional economics and Third World development, Routledge. Helleiner, G. K. (1992). "The IMF, the World Bank and Africa's adjustment and external debt problems: An unofficial view." World Development 20(6):...
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...It is understood that the general characteristic of neoliberalism is to emphasize and expand the market by increasing transactions and conducting trades to help reinforce the economic power of the latter. Every action is a competitive, market transaction that can occur in a short time or at a fast rate. Economic policies that are promoted by governmental organizations like IMF and structural adjustment programs adequately re-distribute resources from the poor to the rich, which may create poverty and inequality. However, the repayment of debt from these governmental organizations has resulted in deproletarianization. The neoliberal economic model is deemed unsustainable because not all countries have access to the same resources and benefits. In addition, neoliberalism does not fully account for gender and racial divisions of labor that is an obvious feature in the global economy. For example, many people who are already living in poor countries who need to obtain access and control over resources they need to survive such as, food, water, shelter, and clothing are limited and declining. This issue of inequality is focused on women because they are often responsible for providing food and other necessities for their families. In order to overcome inequality and reach a balance of accessing resources and government benefits within countries and people, re-distribution should be overturned. Obtaining access to resources and a healthy environment is a product of human rights and...
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...After gaining independence, Ghana’s economy had reached a state of crisis and therefore, certain International Financial Institutions (International Monetary Fund and World Bank) had intervened. The goal for Ghana was to pursue economic growth at all costs and seek to achieve through the increase of the Growth Domestic Product and the Growth National Product. Structural adjustment programs (SAP) (designed by the World Bank and IMF) had begun being implemented by the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) and National Democratic Congress (NDC). SAPs can be defined as “the process by which key institutions and policies are reconstructed with the intent on advancing economic growth”. This involves increasing economic dependency and diversifying economic resources. While looking at Peter Arthur’s opposing argument that the IFIs and their strategies were detrimental to Ghana’s economy - Kwadwo Kanadu-Agyemang and Darko Kwabena Opoku believe that these strategies and SAPs were beneficial to Ghana’s economy, only to a certain extent. This essay will aim to identify certain criticisms of Ghana undergoing the SAP as well as which sectors of the SAP were beneficial to Ghana. Furthermore, this essay will identify that the ‘imposition’ of the SAPs was indeed necessary and less destructive than its critics state. Colonial rule ended for Ghana in 1957 and they became politically independent and they were “the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to do so”. Ghana had ebeen the world’s...
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...POVERTY REDUCTION STRATEGY PAPER ANALYSIS INTRODUCTION Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) were introduced in 1999 by the World Bank and the IMF as a new framework to enhance domestic accountability for poverty reduction reform efforts (Web.worldbank.org). The initial Structural Adjustment Programme failed, as pointed out by Rapley, 2007, almost every country that has implemented structural adjustment programme has seen its own share of strikes and riots in response to deteriorating living standards and rising unemployment. Donors acknowledged that, lack of government commitment or “ownership” was a main factor for the failure of structural adjustment policies (Driscoll et al, 2004). As a result, the IMF and World Bank restructured their terms of engagement. They promoted PRSPs as being “country owned”, participatory and as taking a universal approach to poverty (Bradshaw and Linneker, 2003). However, whether these arguments reflect the reality is open for debate. Through in-depth analysis of various PRSPs articles and civil society reports, the report will analyse the concept of PRSPs for the purpose of enlightening a British based development Non- Governmental Organisation. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES • Analyse the significant change in policy and discuss what PRSPs actually entails. • Provide a clear and balanced analysis to the British based development NGO before they promote the participation of national civil actors in the PRSP design process. Finally, the report...
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...Even their most ardent supporters now concede that growth has been below expectations in Latin America (and the “transition crisis” deeper and more sustained than expected in former socialist economies). “is that there is no unique universal set of rules…. [W]e need to get away from formulae and the search for elusive ‘best practices’….” (p. xiii).4 The record - RESULTS Here is how Learning from Reform summarizes the surprises of the 1990s. First, there was an unexpectedly deep and prolonged collapse in output in countries making the transition from communism to market economies. More than a decade into the transition, many countries had still not caught up to their 1990 levels of output. Second, Sub-Saharan Africa failed to take off, despite significant policy reform, improvements in the political and external environments, and continued foreign aid. The successes were few—with Uganda, Tanzania, and Mozambique the most commonly cited instances—and remained fragile more than a decade later. Third, there were frequent and painful financial crises in Latin America, East Asia, Russia, and Turkey. Most had remained unpredicted by financial markets and economists until capital flows started to reverse very suddenly. Fourth, the Latin American recovery in the first half of the 1990s proved short-lived. The 1990s as a whole saw less growth in Latin America in per-capita GDP than in 1950-80, despite the dismantling of the state-led, populist, and protectionist policy regimes...
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...Re-organization and Layoff: Issue and Problem Identification PHL/320 Re-organization and Layoff: Issue and Problem Identification In Week Two, Team D discussed the article Mismanaged layoffs can go ‘horribly wrong’ (Bouw, 2013.) The initially chosen focus of the group discussion was the potential ramifications of poorly handling the conversation terminating the employee. Reflecting on the article through further group discussion, and realizing the scope of the team’s initial impression is limiting the problem to a small component of the larger issue, Team D asserts the broader issue is that employers often turn to downsizing as the go-to method of cutting costs. Experts in the Bouw article provide evidence that knee-jerk layoffs to appease shareholder are often a mistake and cite why. Through the collaborative process of discussion, the team benefits from gaining confidence in the decision to change the focus of issue exploration from miscommunicating when firing to the drawbacks of layoffs. By clearly defining the problem that was not immediately apparent, Team D can now concentrate on discussing practical solutions for the broader underlying issue of unnecessary downsizing. Problem Identification The first step to successfully tackling any problem is identifying it. According to Dr. Henry Hornstein, downsizing within a company should be the last resort if cost cutting is necessary (Bouw, 2013.) He hypothesizes that it is approximately a 50 percent chance...
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...which communication occurs primarily online or, at a distance. Even if you are enrolled in a course that meets weekly, conflicting schedules can make it difficult to arrange outside meetings with your group members. However, with proper planning and clear communications, teams can work effectively and efficiently with little or no face-to-face contact. Achieving good outcomes requires that individuals with different strengths, weaknesses, and perspectives come together to arrive at consensus. Several tools have been created to help your group get started, get organized, and stay on task. With these tools and tips, you will find that working as a team of educated professionals is not only more efficient but more rewarding as well. This professional collaboration is after all, the nature of nursing. Nurses work with others to help others. Working in teams produces the best outcome for patients and the nursing profession. The first step in working effectively as a team is to arrive at consensus. Before the real work begins, the entire group must agree on fundamental aspects of the work to be done. Together, the group must decide: What the outcome or final product should look like? What the objective is and what method should be used to achieve it? Who should be responsible for doing what tasks, given their experience and talents? What approach should be used when attempting to solve a problem or conflict within the group? Collectively, this process is called “group think...
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...Groupthink is the concept of having many people go along in agreement with a decision essentially because, either someone of authority has spoken and others are afraid to contradict their idea, or because in the silence of a discussion, each individual believes that others agree with the “apparent” consensus and don’t want to demolish the group cohesiveness . For example, have you ever thought about raising an issue or question in a group meeting, but then abstained because you didn’t want to destroy the consensus view the team had spent considerable time forming, or because you didn’t want to appear to be the only unsupportive member of the team? Conversely, have you ever been a manager who has had to force a team through change when clearly the team was hesitant and not expressing their true opinions? or have you ever been in a situation where you have a team school project and all of you just agree with a certain suggestion because you just want the meeting to be done as soon as possible? The answer to these questions is groupthink. Along with this, the only thing that can help managers combat the groupthink effects is staying aware of the number of key indicators, or symptoms that this mentality presents. The four main symptoms of groupthink are: illusion of invulnerability, self censorship, direct pressure and an illusion of unanimity. One of the most dangerous symptoms of groupthink is the illusion of invulnerability, in which the entire group believes to have...
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...The issue of when women are the leader an organization is becoming a good reason to discuss with. According to (Cohen & Huffman, 2007; Brenner and colleagues, 1989) concluded that today’s female manager expected to treat their colleagues both men and women fairly in promotion, selection and placement decisions. There is no such biased in career. Talent does not discriminate gender. Everyone can be a good manager. But to be a good manager the person need to have several things such as skills, talent and the ability in managerial. Besides, leadership roles that is the trait to lead others shown by women through their leadership style can empower followers, building trust and innovative which suited to business challenges nowadays (Eagly & Carli, 2007). Organization that do not pay a proper attention to this talent- management issue, will suffer because they fail to keep up with others in the movement of the world today, especially to their competitors. Organization need to work even harder to attract, develop and to retain the best candidates to serve as the next generation of leaders. In the history of various cultures, women have always excelled than men. According to the list of Fortune 1000 list of companies publishes by Fortune Magazine, women hold 4.6 percent of Fortune 1000 list of CEO position. Despite of being minority in managerial world, women make a better manager because they are highly motivated, easy to communicate, have the power to convince people and have a capability...
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...Failures Paper Charles Persinger University of Phoenix POS/355 Jeff Rugg April 28, 2014 Simply put, distributed computing is allowing computers to work together in groups to solve a single problem too large for any one of them to perform on its own. Distributed computing is not a simple matter of just sticking the computers together. For a distributed computation to work effectively, those systems must cooperate, and must do so without lots of manual intervention by people. This is usually done by splitting problems into smaller pieces, each of which can be tackled more simply than the whole problem. The results of doing each piece are then reassembled into the full solution. As handy as a distributed system can be there are a there are four main issues you could face: Operating system failures, Hardware Failures, Omission Failures and Byzantine Failures. Crash failures are caused across the server of a typical distributed system and if these failures are occurred operations of the server are halt for some time. Operating system failures are the best examples for this case and the corresponding fault tolerant systems are developed with respect to these affects. Hardware failures used to be more common, but with all of the recent innovations in hardware design and manufacturing they tend to be fewer and far between with most of these physical failures tending to be network or drive related. With more hardware the probability goes up that there will...
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