Мировой финансовый кризис и концепции развития

The Global Financial Crisis and Development Thinking

Abstract

The global financial crisis has not only dealt a major blow to the global economy, but also shaken confidence in economic management in the developed world and the economic models that guide it. The crisis has revealed major market failures, especially in the housing bubble and its transmission to the financial system, but also glaring state failures that propagated and exacerbated the crisis. Will the events of the past two years lead to major shifts in thinking about development economics, and should they? This paper assesses that question for several key domains of development thinking, including the market-state balance, macroeconomic management, globalization, development financing, and public spending. On the one hand, changed global circumstances and new awareness of vulnerability should lead to some policy changes, as developing countries take steps to reduce and buffer risks, including risks generated in developed countries. At the same time, the crisis should largely reinforce the Post-Washington Consensus on development that has emerged over the past decade—a world view that aims to achieve private sector-driven growth but sees a facilitating role for the state, promotes engaging with the global economy in ways that advance development, and values pragmatism, experimentation, and evidence-based policymaking over ideology.

Economic crises typically trigger changes in economic thinking as well as in behavior. The Great Depression made possible the rise of Keynesian economics, which then held sway for more than a generation. Keynesianism took hold not only because it had value as a description of some states of the world, but also because economic disaster opened minds to new ideas. The pain of stagflation in the 1970s and early 1980s raised the stature of monetarist and New Classical approaches, and at the same time spurred the development of an alternative, New Keynesianism, that was compelled to use tools and assumptions borrowed from the New Classicals. And in much of the developing world, the debt-crisis and stagnation of the 1980s increased the legitimacy of alternatives to import-substituting industrialization that had predominated in previous decades. In each case, the intellectual structure for the new thinking had been under construction before the crisis fully hit, but the crisis helped make it habitable for policymakers.