Author: Lance E. Hoovestal

The origins of mercantilism can be traced in Europe back through the late Renaissance and early modern period (from the 15th to the 18th century). Under the mercantilist doctrine of economic protectionism trade between the neighboring colonies of rival empires was discouraged. Economic nationalism is...

24 May, 2015 /

The “Washington Consensus,” identified as such in 1989 by the free-market economist John Williamson, is often seen as being synonymous with neoliberalism. The term describes a set of ten relatively specific economic policy recommendations that were designed to help developing nations. They articulated the views...

24 May, 2015 /

The Bretton Woods Conference framers constructed three international institutions that formed the backbone of the global economic system. British economist John Maynard Keynes and the leader of the US delegation, Harry D. White, were the key contributors. Keynes led the effort to form an independent...

23 May, 2015 /

The concept of a post- WWII free-market framework was fulfilled at the Bretton Woods Conference in July 1944, where—with 45 national delegations in attendance—the United States and its allied planners prepared for the establishment of a freer and more open international economic system. This was...

23 May, 2015 /

At the epicenter of Cold War tension was U.S. and Soviet obsession with absolute security. The lesson each protagonist had learned from WWII made strategic security preeminent. To attain this security, military and internationalist-alliance strategies were exhaustively employed. Ultimately, however, genuine security was determined by the economic...

23 May, 2015 /

In the 1970s crippling government regulation, excessive public spending, and high tariff barriers to international trade, brought about a new kind of new type of “free-marketeer": the neoliberalist. Analysts of this ilk used the chronic economic crises that were manifest in the 1980s to promote...

23 May, 2015 /

Adam Smith’s notion of market-supremacy was the basis for the post-World War II free-market approach that underpinned the Bretton Woods conference. The U.S. emerged from the war aware of its capacity to guide global restoration in ways compatible with its goals. Its main goal was...

23 May, 2015 /

Globalization does not occur in a vacuum—that is to say, there is more to it than innovations in communication and transportation. It requires, for example, the widespread implementation of economic doctrines like the liberalist, free-market one. Adam Smith (1723–90) was influential in promoting such liberalism,...

22 May, 2015 /