CEPAL, Economic Development, and Inequality

Abstract

Latin American structuralism, first promulgated in 1949 by the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, held that Latin American economies were characterized by heterogeneous technologies, structural unemployment, external disequilibrium, and secularly deteriorating terms of trade. The crisis of structuralism in the latter 1960s, following the exhaustion of “easy” import substitution, ultimately resulted in “neostructuralism” in 1990, a reformed version of the doctrine that emphasized greater equity in income distribution, expansion of export markets, aggressive pursuit of technological change, and continuous “learning by doing.” In the last two decades, CEPAL’s interest has focused on issues of inequality in the global region that is still the most unequal in the world.