“The phrase ‘Washington Consensus’ was coined to capture the agreement upon economic policy that was shared between the two major international financial institutions in Washington (IMF and World Bank) and the US government itself. This consensus stipulated that the best path to economic development was through financial and trade liberalization and that international institutions should persuade countries to adopt such measures as quickly as possible.”[93] The debt crisis provided the perfect opportunity to quickly impose these conditions upon countries that were not in a position to negotiate and with no time to spare, desperately in need of loans. Without the debt crisis, such policies may have been subject to greater scrutiny, and with a case-by-case analysis of countries adopting SAPs, the world would become quickly aware of their dangerous implications. The debt crisis was absolutely necessary in implementing the SAPs on an international scale in a short amount of time.

            
The effect became quite clear, as the result “of these policies on the population of developing countries was devastating. The 1980s is known as the ‘lost decade’ of development. Many developing countries’ economies were smaller and poorer in 1990 than in 1980. Over the 1980s and 1990s, debt in many developing countries was so great that governments had few resources to spend on social services and development.”[94] With the debt crisis, countries in the developing world were “[s]tarved of international finance, [and] states had little choice but to open their economies to foreign investors and trade.”[95] The “Third World” was recaptured in the cold grasp of economic colonialism under the auspices of neo-liberal economic theory.