Washington, Brussels, and Beijing Consensus

Abstract

In the new world financial, economic and nowadays debt crisis, the role of international organizations is in focus again. The financial crisis opens the way for IMF credits and for thinking in the European Union. After the second millenary, a scientific dispute started about the credibility of the Washington Consensus in many parts of the world. A new school emerged around Bruno S. Sergi, Roberto Tamborini, and William T. Bagatelas, who has been speaking about a transition from Washington consensus towards Brussels consensus in the case of Eastern European countries. Sergi carefully and precisely calls for specific and active state directed policy that puts economic transition in Europe in a new dimension. By Bagatelas, specifically, under the EU dimension, development under the new "Brussels Consensus” consists of activist state policies based upon assumptions given the world by Keynes, Schumpeter and supply side beliefs. Empirical studies also proved this structural break in macroeconomic policy. Now, the debate on appropriate economic policy is very active again. As in times of recession, Keynes and Keynesian economics has become popular, but the role of the state (and the international organizations) is sorely ambiguous. Our paper is to compare the Washington and the Brussels consensus from a heterodox point of view, and to find the differences of the two conceptions. Finally, we sketch the controversial concept of Beijing Consensus.