Power and styles of development in Latin America

Fifty years after its inception, CEPAL Review continues to focus on the key categories proposed by Raúl Prebisch and Aníbal Pinto in its inaugural issue. This article links the concepts of power and styles of development, on the premise that Latin American structuralism is essentially a political economy of power, in which structured productive power is the substance of economic value. Styles reflect the historical distribution of the fruits of technical progress as determined by asymmetrical power relations within the centre-periphery system. This perspective remains fully relevant today and can be used to analyse twenty-first century capitalism, in particular the new forms of power associated with digital capitalism and platform economies, which pose unprecedented challenges for peripheral development and require regional integration strategies to be rethought.