Raúl Prebisch and the Origins of the Doctrine of Unequal Exchange

Abstract

The perception of the international economic system as one of industrial center and agrarian periphery, in which the former dominates the latter, has had a tremendous influence in the analysis of underdevelopment; the significance of the idea is impossible to gauge because its acceptance is still expanding. Raúl Prebisch's analytical terms, and the concomitant theory of trade relations, now known as unequal exchange, have been adopted not only by the followers of a dependency theory tradition in Latin America, stemming directly from Prebisch, but also by non-Latin American writers (assuredly, with extensive modifications) such as Arghiri Emmanuel, André Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein, Johan Galtung, and Samir Amin.