ABSTRACT

The Washington Consensus, which dominated the development world for over two de cades, has been called into question on both theoretical and empirical grounds (Peerenboom and Bugaric, 2014). Those countries that adhered most closely to it have failed to achieve sustained growth, while the East Asian ‘tigers’ that rejected it and followed their own development path achieved remarkable growth. Many attributed the success of the early East Asian tigers to the East Asian model and the more recent success of China to the China model or Beijing Consensus (Johnson, 1982; Woo-Cumings, 1999).1 However, the lost decade in Japan, the global financial crisis and growing concerns that China may be caught in the dreaded ‘middle-income trap’ have called into question the viability of the East Asian model and its more specific China variants (Eichengreen, Park and Shin, 2011).