In 1985, James A. Baker III's “Program for Sustained Growth” proposed a set of economic policy reforms including, inflation stabilization, trade liberalization, greater openness to foreign investment, and privatization, that he believed would lead to faster growth in countries then known as the Third World, but now categorized as emerging and developing economies (EMDEs). A country-specific, time-series assessment of the reform process reveals three clear facts. First, in the ten-year period after stabilizing high inflation, the average growth rate of real GDP in EMDEs is 2.6 percentage points higher than in the prior ten-year period. Second, the corresponding growth increase for trade liberalization episodes is 2.66 percentage points. Third, in the decade after opening their capital markets to foreign equity investment, the spread between EMDEs average cost of equity capital and that of the US declines by 240 basis points. The impact of privatization is less straightforward to assess, but taken together, the three central facts of reform provide empirical support for the Baker Hypothesis and suggest a simple neoclassical interpretation of the unprecedented increase in growth that has taken place in EMDEs since the early 1990s.

中文翻译：

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贝克假设：稳定、结构改革和经济增长

1985 年，詹姆斯 A. 贝克三世的“持续增长计划”提出了一系列经济政策改革，包括稳定通胀、贸易自由化、更大程度地对外投资开放和私有化，他认为这将导致当时已知的国家更快增长作为第三世界，但现在被归类为新兴和发展中经济体 (EMDE)。对改革进程的国别、时间序列评估揭示了三个明确的事实。首先，在高通胀企稳后的十年内，新兴市场经济体实际GDP平均增速比前十年高出2.6个百分点。其次，贸易自由化事件的相应增长率为 2.66 个百分点。第三，在资本市场向外国股权投资开放后的十年里，新兴市场和发展中经济体的平均股本成本与美国的平均资本成本之间的差距缩小了 240 个基点。私有化的影响不太容易评估，但综合起来，改革的三个核心事实为贝克假设提供了实证支持，并提出了一个简单的新古典主义解释，即自 1990 年代初以来 EMDE 出现前所未有的增长增长。