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Review of International Political
Economy
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrip20 The BRICs and the Washington
Consensus: An introduction a Cornel Ban & Mark Blyth a b

Boston University , Boston , Massachusetts , USA

b

Brown University , Providence , Rhode Island , USA
Published online: 15 Apr 2013.

To cite this article: Cornel Ban & Mark Blyth (2013) The BRICs and the Washington
Consensus: An introduction, Review of International Political Economy, 20:2, 241-255,
DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2013.779374
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2013.779374

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Vol. 20, No. 2, 241–255, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2013.779374

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The BRICs and the Washington Consensus:
An introduction
Cornel Ban1 and Mark Blyth2
1

Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA

2

Over the past two decades, the spread of ideas and policies associated with the Washington Consensus has captured the attention of political economists. As a systemic feature of the global economy, this process of diffusion has merited such scholarly attention. However, the systemic shock of the Great Recession has called into question the oft-noted convergence of rising economic powers such as Brazil, Russia, India and China
(BRICs), along with their supposed relationship to the Washington Consensus policy paradigm. Indeed, the crisis has brought to the fore the question of whether the BRICs have ‘grown apart’ from both the ideas and the policies prepared for them by Washington-based institutions. To date, there has been no systematic scholarly effort aimed at analysing the spread of Washington Consensus ideas and policies in relation to the rise of the
BRICs.
This special issue attempts to fill this gap through six contributions that bring together scholars interested in the political economy of development and the sociology of ideational and institutional change. Their main finding is that the BRICs attempted to balance their adoption of select parts of the
Washington Consensus template while defending and often reinventing the relevance of state-led development policies under