ABSTRACT
The acceptance of neoliberal ideas in the 1980s extended even further beyond the dominant political parties of these key Western, or Northern, countries and penetrated the major institutions of global economic governance, particularly the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Instead, the infusion of neoliberal ideas came from the IMF's conventional hiring practices principally, the requirement of a PhD in economics, preferably from an elite Anglo-American university. As departments of economics across these universities came to form a consensus around neoclassical/neoliberal ideas, so too, inevitably, did their doctoral graduates. The growing influence of economists within the Bank's specialised research departments provided the organisational vehicle for an influx of neoliberal ideas and their gradual coalescence into nothing less than a new paradigm which overtook the Bank and all its policies. The 1980s began with the defeat of the Third World challenge to the existing structure of the world economy and the institutions of global economic governance.
