Neoliberalism
By the 1980s the term ‘neoliberalism’ had come to embrace a distinct range of policies with profound political and social as well as economic consequences. Its ‘economic’ policy aims include moving towards deregulating markets and labour, privatizing state assets, reducing the state (including shrinking the public sector), and cutting public expenditure on social provision (‘individual responsibility’ rather than ‘welfare’). For advocates of neoliberalism, the shrinking of the state and the freeing of enterprise were supposed to be in the interests of all, but the record has been different: unemployment, inequality and debt are widespread.