Economic liberalization in the post–World War II era
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Directly after World War II saw many countries adopt policies of economic liberalization in order to stimulate their economies.
The period directly after the war did not see many, the most notable exception being West Germany's reforms of 1948, which set the stage for the Wirtschaftswunder in the 1950s and helped inform many of the liberalisations that were to come.
However, it was not until the 1970s that the stagflation of the period forced many countries to look for new economic systems. The emergence of neoliberalism and other associated economically liberal doctrines saw a wave of economic liberalisations sweeping the globe.
Starting with Chile in 1975, various governments adopted and implemented liberal policy. The most important of these were Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who developed the initial wave of neoliberal thought in practise.
Chronic economic crisis throughout the 1980s and the collapse of the Communist bloc at the end of the 1980s, helped foster political opposition to state interventionism in favor of unregulated market reform policies. From the 1980s onward, a number of communist and socialist countries initiated various neoliberal market reforms, such as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia under the direction of Ante Marković (until the country's collapse in the early 1990s), and the People's Republic of China under the direction of Deng Xiaoping.
In the 1990s, a second more socially-liberal wave of liberalisation swept the world under Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
