1 Neoliberalism and East Asia: Resisting the Washington Consensus

This paper explores the way neoliberal ideas have been promoted and resisted in East Asia. The core argument of this paper is that the contest of ideas in economic policy-making can evolve independently of their intellectual merit and empirical credibility. Political interests shape and mediate the process. In the case of post-crisis East Asia, the notion that the political economies of the region need to be fundamentally reformed to re-ignite the ‘economic miracle ’ of the pre-crisis era does not stem from a politically neutral, dispassionate and intellectually rigorous analyses of what went wrong in the recession-inducing 1997 financial crisis that engulfed the region. It represents an attempt to re-invent orthodoxy in the domain of economic ideas and ideology by the global policy community that in turn bears the inordinate influence of US-centric institutions. Current debates over the future direction of the reform agenda in post-crisis East Asia have to be set in the broader context of the global debate on the role of ideas and ideology in shaping economic policy-making. Certain ideas gain primacy at one stag