1990s by free market oriented policies. Friedman points out that "countries that have been the most open to globalization, like Taiwan, Singapore, Israel, Chile and Sweden, have achieved standards of living comparable to those in America and Japan" (p. 286). Almost the entire former communist world abandoned statist economic policies and embraced the neo-liberal or Washington Consensus. Friedman says that "globalization means the spread of free-market capitalism to virtually every country in the world" under a set of rules "that revolve around opening, deregulating and privatizing your economy" (p. 8). Wella & Hersh define the Washington Consensus as follows: "growth is maximized when barriers to the free flow of capital and commerce are dismantled and when individual economies are exposed to the discipline, consumer markets and entrepreneurship of the world economic system" (p. A 13).
Globalization has been accompanied by an accommodating international political framework. The 1980s saw the fall of communist rule
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