Dialogus de Beijing Consensus -- Pessimo response regarding Ramo's Third theorem

I don't think that Optimo and I are in much disagreement regarding Ramo's 3rd theorem.  First, to clearify, I don't think that Ramo meant "self-determination' to refer to post-colonial status (since China per se was never a colony -- although parts of it were (e.g., Manchuria, Qingdao, Shanghai and of course Hong Kong).  My own understanding is like that of Optimo -- that by self-determination, Ramo is referring to autonomy with regards to policymaking, and I suspect even more particularly with regards to monatary policy, since Beijing's refusal to float the RMB is probably the most well known and oft-referred to example of Beijing's autonomy from global (American) economic orthodoxy.

Optimo is also probably right in suggesting that I placed too much weight on economic size in setting out a country's capacity to achieve policy self-determination.  However, I do think that is the case with regards to China.  Contrary to Rodrik's suggestion, Japan and South Korea are not good counter-examples, both developed their economies well before the onset of the Washington Consensus hegemony in the mid 1990s, and both were given economic carte-blanc by the US during the 1950s through 1980s primarily due to their front-line status during the Cold War.  I remember hearing a Washington DC policymaker or think-tank type saying during the early 1990s that Washington had "learned its lesson" from Japan, and "would not make the same mistake again", meaning that Washington was not about to let other government -- I recall he was referring specifically to Taiwan and the Mainland -- get away with the disregard for the global neoliberalism, particularly insofar as trade and IPR were concerned.  How autonomous India's economic policymaking is is an open question, India's efforts to defend its economic policies with regards to compulsory licensing of medicines has met with limited success, and according to some appear likely to fail in the long run (see, e.g., Christopher Arup, “The Transfer of Pharmaceutical Patent Laws: The Case of India’s Paragraph 3(d),” in Law and Development and the Global Discourses of Legal Transfers (John Gillespie and Pip Nicholson, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 121-142).  More recently, it's ability to set policy with regards to foreign investment has been dealt a significant blow when a ruling by an international investment effectively required Indian law to give foreign investors greater protections than they give their own domestic firms (see the White Industries v India case).

But that having been said, there are indeed examples of smaller economies that have resisted transnational neoliberal hegemony.  The best example of this is probably found in Malaysia's decision to impose capital controls on its currency, against the strong opposition of both the IMF and Wall Street, during the Asian Economic Crisis of the late 1990s.

But at the end of the day, Optimo gets me right when he or she suggested:

Pessimo raises an important question about what defines a model, arguing that it needs to provide guidance for action. If this is the case, Pessimo may have the same reservations to the third theorem that he has regarding the second theorem, i.e. the theorem does not seem to present any guidance to action. Indeed, if anything, the theorem seems to say “do what you think is best”. I would claim instead that it says "do not listen to the World Bank and the IMF", which can be interpreted as a negative guidance for action. If Pessimo wants positive guidance, this may fall a bit short. But I will leave this for Pessimo to confirm (or not) and then I may come back to this in a future post.

Yes, I do think that ultimately, that is my position.   And it lead us directly to the second version of the Beijing Consensus as outlined in the prologue, the 'experimentalist' version set out independently by Randy Peerenboom in his book on the 'East Asian Model' and Dani Rodrik in his article on 'new development economics'.  It is to this I now propose we turn.