Rethinking the Market Reform Paradigm

Rehman Sobhan There is an extensive literature and debate on the conceptual merits of the World Bank's diagnosis and solution of the economic crisis of the third world. The time is now right to bring this conceptual debate from the margins of academia into the mainstream of both academic and political discourse. This paper, which briefly reports on what has happened to the developing economies in the 1980s in the wake of market reforms, is designed to provide the rationale of contemporary experience in the third world for reopening this debate.