Is the Washington Consensus Dead? Growth, Openness, and the Great Liberalization, 1970s-2000s

According to the Washington Consensus, developing countries? growth would benefit from a reduction in tariffs and other barriers to trade. But a backlash against this view now suggests that trade policies have little or no impact on growth. If quot;getting policies rightquot; is wrong or infeasible, this leaves only the more tenuous objective of quot;getting institutions rightquot; (Easterly 2005, Rodrik 2006). However, the empirical basis for judging recent trade reforms is weak. Econometrics are mostly ad hoc; results are typically not judged against models; trade policies are poorly measured (or not measured at all, as when trade volumes are spuriously used); and the most influential studies in the literature are based on pre-1990 experience (which predates the quot;Great Liberalizationquot; in developing countries which followed the GATT Uruguay Round). We address all of these concerns -- by using a model-based analysis which highlights tariffs on capital and intermediate goods; by compiling new disaggregated tariff measures to empirically test the model; and by employing a treatment-and-control empirical analysis of pre- versus post-1990 performance of liberalizing and nonliberalizing countries. We find evidence that a specific treatment, liberalizing tariffs on imported capital and intermediate goods, did lead to faster GDP growth, and by a margin consistent with theory (about 1 percentage point per annum). Endogeneity problems are considered and other observations are consistent with the proposed mechanism: changes to other tariffs, e.g. on consumption goods, though collinear with general tariffs reforms, are more weakly correlated with growth outcomes; and the treatment and control groups display different behavior of investment prices and quantities, and capital flows