 The Washington Census describes a set of policies that were pushed hard by the IMF and even more at one point by the World Bank during a period in which the developing countries and not least the African countries were in very great difficulty, economic difficulty. But well before that, there is a certain inbreeding among policy people in Washington within the Beltway as they say there. And it's very difficult to break out of that. I worked not only in wider, but in other places, notably the IDRC, the International Development Research Center of Canada, to build different patterns, different networks of thought and experience, so that it would not all derive from one central base, one center of thought, so that no matter what the policy issue, it would not be filtered through Washington and then brought back to you. So if Argentina had something happening, it got analyzed in Washington and its experience was fed to Nigeria from Washington, not from Argentina to Nigeria and back directly, which I think was unfortunate and was necessary to do something about. The principal issue was whether the stabilization programs were throttling the prospect of growth and development. In our earlier stages, we did not make as much of an issue of income distribution as UNICEF later did. We were before adjustment with the human face. Under UNICEF, with which I was also associated. In our day, in our project, it was mainly about, as in fact the developing countries group, the group of 24 had previously argued, about the need to sustain development, sustain growth and not throttle it. As if the IMF was asking people to hold their breath, to tighten their belts, but at some point you have to breathe again. It wasn't obvious that having tightened the belt, you would ever be able to breathe again. We tried to think through the investment implications, the longer term implications of the kind of gross throttling austerity programs that the IMF was demanding. In the case of this project involved some quite different modeling approaches, which IMF analysts thought peculiar at our final session in Helsinki, I guess in 1986, prior to the writing of Lance Taylor's summary volume, but after all 18 authors had done pretty close to a final draft, we invited two IMF research people. Should I name them? To the meeting. It was clear throughout that they thought we were wild. We were all pupils of Lance Taylor's strange ideas and why didn't we follow their orthodoxy? It actually in the final session of that conference in the meeting, it became very, very heated over a discussion on Argentina. And it became so heated that I was in the chair and the meeting couldn't stop. The time had come for the meeting to end. It was five o'clock, and everybody said, no, we can't stop. This has to go on. We have to hear. The Argentines were telling the IMF research analysts who had not been on the missions, who did not know what had actually transpired in detail. Whereas the Argentine, who later became a member of the wider board, actually, was directly involved, knew exactly what was going on, and was very angry and told the IMF people. So the meeting went on, and they finally told us they had to close the building. An hour and a half later, we finally stopped. But from that, largely I think from that, there came back to us the word that in Washington, other places, wider, was now known as wilder. My principal work, at least the places where I have lived and worked, were African, and the need for capacity was obvious as evident by the fact that I was being asked to do work that Africans should have been doing. I had no knowledge of the local background, history, culture, language. It was crazy for people like me, let alone IMF missions, to be trying to analyze complex policy questions in African countries. It was perfectly obvious that one had to build local capacity to make their own policy questions in their own interest. If you are in possession of technical tools that your adversary and an argument does not possess, you are able, and certainly in modern economics, to say, as Carlos would put it, hocus pocus mumbo jumbo, therefore you are wrong. And the essential thing was to build the capacity of people so that they could say, mumbo jumbo, hocus pocus, I have another result. And you require credibility in the profession of economics. You have to, even if you think the models are crazy, even if you think the assumptions are all screwed up, and even if you think it doesn't apply to the real world, you still need to be able to talk the language in order to be credible. And the hocus pocus mumbo jumbo was, I think, a perfect illustration of the kind of thing that was happening, particularly where I know best in Africa. Carlos was drawing on his Latin American experience, where missions would come in for two or three weeks, analyze the situation, produce results. And if you objected, you don't understand the model. This is our model. There would be a number of equations, actually very simple crude ones, were in use at that time. And that was it. You had no way in which you could argue back unless you had the relevant tool. There is a book put out by the IMF that I have edited. I chaired a meeting between the IMF and the governors of African Central Banks. They subsequently didn't ask me to do it again, but I was credible enough. So I did appear in lots of World Bank events, prominently appear. And in one drastic IMF one, to which I was not invited back, Robert McNamara was a supporter of wider. I don't know that this is widely known. And in the fall of 1985, Lal decided that he would reach out to many of his contacts in the public services of the world, as well as academics, and form an international advisory, international economic advisory group. These were people who would advise on projects in the international arena, not domestic poverty issues. And one of those who came at Lal's invitation was Robert McNamara. He believed, I think, that as many of us believed that it was not healthy for so much development expertise to be concentrated in one place, where there was inevitably, I mean, there were disagreements among World Bank personnel, but there was a certain brand, a certain party line, that it was dangerous to go too far away from. And he believed that that was unhealthy. It would be good for the world to have other places in which similar problems were addressed without the constraints that World Bank personnel faced, a place that was independent, academically oriented, but policy relevant. And he was quite keen on that. And in his later years, he was a more open-minded and I found him to be a good companion. I can't speak for his historical record, not all of which I approve of. But as a companion on UN committees and at this wider meeting, he was a pleasant person to be with. As the original project with Lance Taylor came to an end, I guess we both decided we would move to a second stage on medium term strategy. The original project was based on sheer stabilization. If you had raging inflation and the balance of payments problem was out of control, how did you deal with it? That was the original issue. Our second project was what do you do in the medium term, three, five years, something like that. And I joined that one and wrote the paper on trade, trade policy. Subsequent, well I guess by the end of that meeting, Lance decided he wanted to have another round featuring the role of the state and longer term, even longer term policy. At that point I thought I wanted to focus on trade. I had invested some in that, believed it to be important, believed there were many things wrong with the way in which it was being treated in policy. And at the end of that meeting on medium term adjustment, I sat down and wrote a proposal for a trade project. And that was an attempt first to challenge the theoretical base of current trade theory, trade policy, theory and policy. And secondly to once again draw on southern research people to analyze their own experience with trade and related policies with particular reference to industrialization, which was their prime concern in the discussions we had had. And from that came first a book on essentially theoretical base and then my favorite project which was the 18 country study each done by someone from the country which was a challenge to the then dominant view which was the product of an OECD study by Little Skatowsky and Scott, three eminent northern economists with no experience in 12 countries whatsoever. Our project was intended to challenge their conclusions which were very orthodox which were essentially free trade is good for you, liberalize as soon as you can, as fast as you can. All the problems developing countries were facing with a product of import substitution which had been a mistake, heavy protection that damaged their development prospects and liberalized trade was a solution to their problems. Of course I'm simplifying but that's the gist of what they had to say. We knew that there are many many choices between autarky, zero trade and free trade as in the stabilization project the essence of the findings was variety. Enormous range of policies many of which had nothing to do with trade that influenced the prospect of success or failure of industrialization and development more generally. There were many many policy tools even in the trade arena which were more complicated than the the orthodoxy made out. So the orthodoxy had a very oversimplified view that policies that had been pursued were anti-export and across the board this was damaging what we uncovered was in fact most countries had all kinds of pro-export policies in place to offset any anti-export bias and some of them are direct subsidies some of them may be illegal under the international rules but going forward nonetheless and all sorts of credit specialized credit arrangements to favor companies that needed help it was just a whole lot more complicated that the range of incentives within the incentive system that economics is supposed to be studying was enormous and could not be simplified into anti-export bias in import substitution moreover a lot of the import substitution had been very successful had generated success stories that eventually led to world competitive exports and the story was simply more complicated more diverse and above all to me the role of the exchange rate emerged as dominating all trade policy influences now this is a period of global economic turbulence study the studies we were doing during a period of really great global imbalances and we put it in the title of the book turbulent times and the variations in exchange rates and actually more accurately real exchange rates inflation adjusted exchange rate were very great and were typically greater than the height of the highest tariff so it wasn't about tariffs so much as about varying exchange rate if you really want to understand whether countries were making a success or not of their industrial policy in general the message was industrial policies go far beyond trade policy and the exchange rate the real exchange rate is enormously important particularly in times of global turbulence the new wider director at that time was andre cornea who was an old friend for whom i had written a nice letter of recommendation for his appointment at wider i know a marcheson wrote one too he had worked for unicef at a time when i was helping them as well and he asked me for ideas as to what wider might do and i i gave him a list of things i thought would be worth doing in all in the international arena finance and trade and he uh he called my bluff he he said well you know what are you you're giving this is what are you going to what are you going to do you want you have to do something what what would you what would you do with this and i looked again at the list and uh well uh the non-traditional exporting from africa had been something that uh had bothered me as a policy matter for for years and had kept coming up in a erc meetings uh the african economic research consortium where african research people presented their their research findings on on their economic problems the repeated uh repeated discussions of the need to develop something other than the primary products oil and minerals and agricultural products that were their base and um it seemed to me that a project that focused on how other countries had done it had moved as they had in southeast asia in particular would be useful for africa and i hoped to involve lots of african researchers in that project uh i did in the first instance i i think we started with eight countries uh but the limitations of data and uh quality of uh early uh inputs were such that we ended up with only five and half of the book that we produced uh was devoted to uh other countries in uh asia and central america that had successfully moved into new non-traditional exports uh but i think we did some uh some useful uh education capacity building in our in our meetings about about these matters even among those who did not complete the project with wider they i think they probably benefited from our discussion of what needed doing how to analyze it um i i i think so but but that book uh non-traditional exports has not uh to my mind been uh been one of the uh the better ones in which i was involved the ones i am proud to stop are the uh the one that lance taylor wrote in which my name isn't on uh but which i think i had some influence on and the the fat one on uh trade policy and industrialization in turbulent times which um had 18 country studies and and a great introduction uh summarizing it uh but which received no attention whatsoever in the academic world to my knowledge it was never reviewed in an academic journal i i never saw a review of it and uh partly to offset that uh lull or or perhaps someone else in wider decided it be a good idea to put out a discussion paper uh summarizing our results and i did that which i think was a pretty good uh summary of the project and what it found and i thought well at least this will get around and then i discovered that uh at that time uh wider's distribution uh list was was a problem i i started to ask my friends around the world what well what did you think of my paper my summer what paper they never heard of this paper wider's uh publications just didn't seem to be going where uh i thought they needed to go i think things have changed a lot since then and they uh outreach and impact uh uh dissemination is a huge issue which i did not understand during my years as an academic until much too late