ABSTRACT
The propositions which can be grouped together under the banner of the structuralist school of development were mainly put forward by social scientists working for the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), a United Nations agency established in 1947 and located in Santiago, Chile.1 Latin American structuralism emerged haphazardly as ECLA’s initial concern lay in discovering the major obstacles to development in Latin America and suggesting policies to overcome these. Thus, the concern was more practical than scholastic. By this I do not want to imply that they dismissed theory. On the contrary, their original contribution to development studies grew out of their profound dissatisfaction with prevailing orthodox and neoclassical theories. In their view neoclassical economics had, at best, little to contribute to the understanding of the development problems facing the peripheral countries and, by perpetuating the income disparity between the centre and periphery, at worst, legitimized a development pattern in the periphery which was detrimental to growth. Latin American economists and a few sociologists working largely in ECLA aimed to construct an alternative autochthonous analysis, ECLA provided the institutional infrastructure and the inspiration for this alternative project, particularly under its well-known Executive Secretary, Raúl Prebisch.2 Thus, structuralism can also be referred to as the ECLA school of thought or the ECLA theory of development.
