Everything I have learned so far points to that the “developing” countries that succeeded all managed to avoid the “shock therapy” of the IMF and the World Bank.
This is an extremely compelling correlation to me, and it seems to suggest that neoliberalism has broken a large number of countries in the world.
@Patricia can you prove that it's simply not the case that the most desperate countries are the least able to deny the IMF?, most countries that went through something that could be described as a corollary too "shock therapy" (witch in itself was unique to post soviet Russia) had already exhausted all other options.
@ekg “witch in itself was unique to post soviet Russia”? I’m not sure where you got this, this was rolled out in most Latin American countries and in Asia and I’m sure in Africa too, but I don’t know enough about that.
And like I said, it is a correlation, but many of the countries that succeeded were also extremely poor at the time.
@Patricia it's a very specific term that refers to post soviet Russia, yes it has been used to describe other places as well. It's a bit like calling morden Israel for an apartheid, even though the term is originally specific to South Africa.
@ekg I dispute that it is a specific term for post Soviet Russia. Also I don’t see that it matters.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/shock-therapy.asp
@ekg note that the “shock therapy” in Latin America preceded the wall falling.
@ekg from Wikipedia: “The first instance of shock therapy was the neoliberal reforms of Chile under Pinochet, carried out after the military coup by Augusto Pinochet. The reforms were based on the liberal economic ideas centered on the University of Chicago, which became known as the Chicago Boys.”
This is where they practiced before they came to Eastern Europe
@Patricia if we use Wikipedia as a source, "The term was popularized by Aom Klein. In her 2007 book The Shook Doctrine" from the Wikipedia page on shock therapy under the subline "orgins of the term "shock therapy" " witch greatly implies that the term was not in common use until after then current event. There does however exist a general reference to rapid reform to freemarket policies, but also more specific reference to post soviet states. So I would say its a wash.
@ekg this is possibly the most uninteresting conversation I’ve had in a while. Let’s just end it here.
