Dependency Theory and Philosophical Critiques of Development

Dependency theory (teoría de la dependencia) emerged from the work of the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch (1901-1986), who as executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL/ECLAC) from 1950 to 1963 formulated the Prebisch-Singer thesis, independently proposed by Hans Singer in the same period, arguing that the terms of trade between primary-commodity-exporting peripheral economies and manufactured-goods-exporting core economies tend to deteriorate structurally over time against the periphery, undermining the classical liberal assumption that free trade would allow poorer nations to "catch up" through comparative advantage alone. Prebisch's structuralist economics, developed further at CEPAL through the 1950s-60s, recommended import-substitution industrialization (ISI) as a policy response, and this "developmentalist" framework shaped economic policy across much of Latin America, including Brazil under Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961) and Argentina under various governments, for roughly three decades.