The term 'Washington Consensus', coined by economist John Williamson in 1989, named a set of market-oriented policy prescriptions promoted by the IMF, World Bank and US Treasury for developing economies. It called for fiscal discipline, privatisation, deregulation, trade and financial liberalisation, and the protection of property rights. Applied through structural-adjustment and reform programmes, it reshaped public spending, infrastructure provision and the role of the state in housing and services across Latin America, Africa and the post-communist world. Its social effects, including widening inequality, made it intensely contested.
It set the dominant policy paradigm of the 1990s, shrinking the state's role in housing and infrastructure and shifting urban provision toward markets across much of the developing world.