Williamson has claimed, on repeated occasions, that he did not intend his list of policies to constitute “a general acceptance of neoliberalism.” But his list nonetheless captured the essential features of what we now call austerity policies rather well. Moreover, taking exchange rate and FDI policies off the list, it’s hard to see how this set of policies, drawn up in 1989 at the “end of history” moment, was reflective of the actual practices of OECD states in this period. For example, France, Italy, and all of Scandinavia, to name but a few OECD states, did not pursue such policies to any significant degree before 1999, let alone 1989. Outside the OECD the more successful developing states such as Korea, Taiwan, and latterly China, practiced these policies even less. Individual states may exhibit a few of these policies, with the United States and the United Kingdom once again at the forefront in generalizing their policies as universal, but the notion that they constituted an empirically settled consensus on “what the rich folks do” was taking it a bit far.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 435