Liberalising reforms have more often than not delivered medium-term growth improvements

See Big reforms, big returns? Evidence from structural reform shocks by Alessio Terzi & Marco Pasquale Marrazzo. From the journal Economic Modelling.

"Abstract

Following a series of disappointing outcomes in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, traditional structural reform shocks, of the type advocated under the ‘Washington Consensus’, came to be widely viewed as unsuccessful. This paper revisits that conclusion by applying a novel generalised use of the non-parametric Synthetic Control Method with multiple treated units to estimate the impact of 23 policy reform shocks (spanning both real and financial sector measures) implemented globally between 1961 and 2000. Our results suggest that, notwithstanding a muted short-term impact, wide-reaching reforms on average raised GDP per capita by around 6 percentage points over a decade. These findings are robust across alternative specifications, placebo and falsification tests, and different reform indicators. While outcomes were heterogeneous, the results indicate that broad liberalising reforms have more often than not delivered medium-term growth improvements, underscoring the importance of understanding the conditions under which they succeed." 

Also see What is the “Washington Consensus?” by Douglas A. Irwin and Oliver Ward. Excerpt:

"The main Washington Consensus policies include maintaining fiscal discipline, reordering public spending priorities (from subsidies to health and education expenditures), reforming tax policy, allowing the market to determine interest rates, maintaining a competitive exchange rate, liberalizing trade, permitting inward foreign investment, privatizing state enterprises, deregulating barriers to entry and exit, and securing property rights."