Misunderstood Moderate

摘要

It is hard to think of a better moment for the appearance of the first full biography of Raul Prebisch, an Argentine who was a towering figure in the international debates on economic development from the 1940s to the 1970s. He was often talked of as "Latin America's Keynes", though the resemblance was only partial. Prebisch was more of a policymaker and economic diplomat than a theorist. Rather like Keynes, he fell out of favour in the 1980s. Now, also like Keynes, Prebisch may be due for a comeback, at least in Latin America. That makes it all the more important to disentangle what he thought from the views with which he was often associated. Prebisch is best known for his ideas on international trade. These emerged from his precocious career in Argentina, which included setting up the country's statistics office and central bank, as Edgar Dosman, a Canadian academic, ably describes. In the 1930s he also acted as Argentina's leading trade diplomat when his country's prosperity was threatened by the problems of Britain, the main market for its meat and grains. He concluded that the price of primary products tended to decline relative to those of manufactured goods (which embodied higher productivity), and thus that industrialised countries derived more benefit from trade than developing ones.