- A New Consensus on Development?
SANTIAGO, Chile – International experts reflected on the new frontiers of economic thinking and Latin America and the Caribbean’s development challenges at a high-level seminar organised by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and held at the regional organisation’s headquarters in Santiago, Chile.
This gathering on April 21, 2026 – entitled The London Consensus in Latin America and the Caribbean – brought distinguished specialists together to discuss three central themes: productive development policies, the macroeconomic challenges of growth with stability and equity, and trade and investment dynamics in a changing global economy. The goal was to create a space for reflection and dialogue that would help enrich the regional debate on how to respond to a context of disruptions.
“Today’s discussion is essentially a reflection on how economic thinking has changed in the last 35 years,” José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, ECLAC’s executive secretary, affirmed during the seminar’s opening session.
“And why is it so important to have this progress in the realm of ideas and to be clear about what should be discarded or left behind, and what is new or relevant? Because ideas are very influential, for better or for worse (…) Psychology has demonstrated that human beings think and process information based on narratives. It is narratives that polarise, or mobilise or paralyse us to take action, in one direction or another. And in fact paradigms are a kind of narrative, they are a perspective that helps structure thinking, mixing values with diagnoses and evidence. That is why at ECLAC we have focused so much attention on updating and fine-tuning our narratives about the region’s development challenges,” he added.
The senior United Nations official summarised the main takeaways from the edited volume The London Consensus: Economic Principles for the 21st Century, citing, for example, the focus on well-being; the importance of growth, but also of the structural conditions of the place in which that growth is occurring; the need to build resilience; and the central role of the State.
“Having this London Consensus today, which reclaims several proposals that are part of ECLAC’s thinking, is gratifying to us and constitutes an act of justice in the history of ideas. I am referring, for example, to industrial policies – or, as we at ECLAC prefer to call them, Productive Development Policies; to the debate about the role of the State and markets; to reflections on the corrosive effects of inequality and low social mobility, along with policies to address them; and to the environmental dimension,” he underlined.
Meanwhile, Andrés Velasco, Dean of the LSE School of Public Policy and co-editor of the book, delivered a keynote address in which he explored the initiative’s analyses and proposals in greater detail. These proposals gather the lessons learned after a quarter-century of the Washington Consensus and present a series of guiding principles for thinking about and taking action on economic development.
In his presentation, the scholar stressed that the London Consensus allows for identifying what does not work in economic policy; distinguishing between principles and policies, recognising that policies depend on the particular conditions of each context; and identifying principles in order to, based on them, offer policies that are conditional propositions. In addition, it reveals the importance of narratives in political and economic debates.
Furthermore, he underscored that “productive development policies and productivity are a leitmotif of the papers presented in the London Consensus” and noted that “there is also an emphasis on orienting technological progress so that Artificial Intelligence and the new technologies can serve to complement skills and improve human productivity.”
The keynote address by Andrés Velasco was commented on by José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, along with Ricardo Hausmann, Professor of the Practice of Political Economy at Harvard University, and Barbara Stallings, William R. Rhodes Research Professor at Brown University (virtually).
In addition to the initial segment, the seminar featured panels on three topics: productive development policies, macroeconomic policies and international trade.
Prestigious panelists participated in the seminar, including Tristan Reed, Economist in the World Bank’s Development Research Group; Mario Marcel, former minister of finance and former Governor of the Central Bank of Chile; Jessica Roldán, director of Macroeconomic Studies at the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean (CAF); Piero Ghezzi, former minister of production of Peru; and Chad Bown, from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, along with other prominent figures.
This daylong event allowed participants to assess and contrast the London Consensus proposals with ECLAC’s conceptual and empirical body of work, as well as with its policy recommendations in areas such as productive development, macroeconomics for development, and international integration.
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