Raúl Prebisch and the development agenda at the dawn of the twenty-first century

The hundredth anniversary of the birth of Raúl Prebisch
is an invaluable opportunity for us to take another look
at the ideas of this great Latin American, one of the
thinkers from the developing world who has had the
strongest influence in world economic debates. His
ideas have been the subject of heavy criticism, but much
of this has been based on distorted versions of his
thinking or of its practical application, rather than his
true intellectual work. Taking his proposals out of their
historical context has also been a frequent practice, even
by some of his own followers. It should be remembered,
in particular, that many of his proposals were made in
the light of the collapse of the international trade and
financial system in the 1930s, whose reconstruction had
barely begun when he published his most influential
works (Prebisch, 1949, 1951 and 1952);.
This essay tries to show that some of the basic ideas
in Prebisch thinking remain valid, and it reformulates
them as a function of ECLACs most recent proposals
and the contributions of other schools of economic
thought.