As Dani Rodrik notes, IMF policy in this period, aided and abetted by the World Bank, devolved to a mantra of "stabilize, privative, and liberalize" as "codified in John Williamson's well-known Washington Consensus." The result was a series of one-size-fits-all policies that were applied from Azerbaijan to Zambia whose objective was to "minimize fiscal deficits, minimize inflation, minimize tariffs, maximize privatization, maximize liberalization of finance." It was, in other words, "expansionary fiscal austerity" in a developmental form, and the results were, by and large, terrible.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 439