In terms of democratic alternatives to neoliberalism, MacEwan criticizes the development-equals-growth argument made by the World Bank and the IMF. Instead development entails widespread improvements in peoples’ well being, relative equality in the distribution of incomes, environmental sustainability, the maintenance of community, and a democratically-directed process of economic change. While considerations of policy are usually conned by realistic considerations of what governments should do to reach already set goals, MacEwan employs a different policy realism that includes democratic participation in the determination of goals by unions and social movements – that is, ‘policy’ involves structural change through popular social action. MacEwan insists that there are democratic alternatives to neoliberalism that do not return to the state-guided development typical of East Asia, Brazil or Indonesia up to the early 1980s, nor do they refer to the failed Soviet communist model.
A democratic economic development strategy would be undermined should it cause instability and inflation. So a macroeconomic framework