A thematic examination of the IMF and the World Bank's recent crisis programmes finds strong evidence of prescriptive continuity with the pre‐crisis repertoire of these organizations, contradicting their legacy of policy adaptation during times of systemic turbulence. How are we to account for this anomaly? The current specialist literature on the Fund and Bank offers plausible explanations, mainly by stressing principal–agent relations and intra‐organizational dynamics. Yet these lender‐oriented approaches need to be complemented by looking at the demand side of the lending relationship as well, that is, by focusing on the Fund and Bank's borrowers. Of particular relevance is the growing diversification of development trajectories in the South, which creates strong disincentives against paradigm recalibration. The article highlights the analytic potential of one vital dimension of this diversification: the shrinking common ground of macroeconomic failure in large emerging economies, illustrated here in a brief comparison of Mexico, Thailand and Turkey.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. With its dilatory and piecemeal fiscal activism and uncharacteristic reluctance toward IMF assistance, the Turkish government's response to the global economic crisis of 2008-2009 sharply contrasted the bold approaches adopted by other major emerging market countries. Underlying this policy exceptionalism were the constraints posed by Turkey's pre-existing policy and macroeconomic constraints, cognitive failures on the part of policymakers, and the conjunctural dynamics of domestic politics. The interplay of these factors progressively narrowed the policy space for vigorous action, leading instead to a motley combination of reactive initiatives that neither offered sufficient protection to the most vulnerable social groups during the crisis nor promised sustainable growth in the long run. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may

Despite an increasingly flexible global policy context, most emerging countries refuse to venture beyond their pre-existing development strategies. This article contends that domestic political constraints under liberalized markets might preclude policy dynamism in some cases. In particular, it draws attention to the tension between market expansion and social cohesion as a formative influence over policy patterns. This tension is sometimes addressed through a conservative countermovement whereby liberally-oriented governments entice sections of the poor into broad electoral coalitions by employing palliative interventions alongside market-expanding policies. Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is one example. Central to the Turkish case has been the redeployment of the country's historic foreign capital-dependent pattern of growth in the service of selective redistribution and credit-fuelled consumerism. The ensuing deficit-led neoliberal populism assured stable and equitable growth in the extraordinary international and domestic context of the mid-2000s, but proved unfeasible since the global crisis. Even then, this coupling of market and social preferences has become politically so firmly entrenched in time that it now constrains the policy options to address Turkey's developmental impasse.

The recent revival of interest in institutions in development studies favors the analysis of macroinstitutions and questions of institutional origination and change. But a strong emphasis on mid-range, sectoral arrangements, and a refined notion of continuity, can also improve our understanding of institutions in late developers-one by facilitating a thick view of institutions while offering a sharp perspective on the current institutional reform agenda, and the other by casting new light on instances of irregular change and failed or partial reform. The trajectory of Turkey's agricultural support regime is used as a case to substantiate this argument. Building on an analytic distinction between resilience and persistence, the article explains the dynamic continuity of populist-corporatist forms of market governance in Turkish agriculture, despite the neoliberalism of the 1980s and 1990s and radical institutional reform efforts of the 2000s.

This article explores the direction, drivers and implications of change in the IMF and the World Bank's policy vision for developing countries before and after the global crisis. By examining the evolution of the Fund's structural conditionalities and the thematic distribution of Bank commitments, it provides evidence for a significant change on the ground: a partial retreat from the post-Washington Consensus (PWC) agenda, which marked a turn-of-the-century upgrade of orthodox neoliberalism. Conceptualising the PWC as a paradigm expansion that followed severe policy failures, the analysis finds that although narrow institutional reforms towards upgrading fiscal and financial regimes remain popular, the good governance and broad institutions dimension of the agenda has recorded a notable decline since the crisis; meanwhile in social policy the twins increasingly diverge. It is argued that this selective disengagement is driven by extant operational imperatives and constraints, which are further intensified by changes in lending framework and the ongoing transformations in development finance. Rather than constitute a shift in policy paradigm, the partial decline of the PWC reflects an adjustment in policy practice towards greater flexibility and discretion in the challenging environment facing the twins. These findings have implications for the study of the Fund and Bank; they also highlight the evolving parameters of North-South development cooperation.