Raul Prebisch
1901 – 1986 Argentine economist, central banker, UN official
The economist behind structuralist development theory and the terms-of-trade critique of global trade.
- Affiliations
- UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA); UNCTAD
Raul Prebisch was an Argentine economist who led the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and later founded UNCTAD. With Hans Singer he argued that the prices of raw-material exports tend to fall against manufactured imports, keeping poor countries poor. His ideas gave dependency theory and Global South trade demands an intellectual base.
In the timeline
- 1948 Founding of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America mentioned
- 1950 Raul Prebisch and the ECLA thesis on unequal exchange central figure
- 1950 The Prebisch-Singer thesis on declining terms of trade mentioned
- 1964 UNCTAD gives the South a forum mentioned