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.