Laissez-faire Approach and Poverty.

For better than two decades, the orthodox recipe for global growth has been embodied in the so-called Washington Consensus. This approach, advocated by the United States and enforced by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), holds that growth is maximized when barriers to the free flow of capital and commerce are dismantled and when individual economies are exposed to the discipline, consumer markets, and entrepreneurs of the world economic system. Proponents of …

…where the enormous population tends to distort world averages. Even so, income inequality within countries is also growing. Success in reducing poverty has been limited. The promises of more-equal income distribution and reduced poverty around the world have failed to materialize under the current form of unregulated globalization. It is time for multinational institutions and other international policy makers to develop a different set of strategies and programs to provide real benefits to the poor.