ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses Raúl Prebisch's ideas on regional integration and the approach developed by Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) to promote the transformation of the region. It demonstrates that Prebisch was an unorthodox thinker of, and advocate for, regional economic integration. His vision of regionalism differed substantially from the approaches proposed by mainstream economic theory at the time, in particular Jacob Viner's customs-union theory. The chapter shows that Prebisch's ideas on regional economic integration evolved significantly from his early years as ECLAC's Executive Secretary to his last works in the 1980s. It reviews Prebisch's intellectual contributions to regional economic integration and discusses their relevance to the present. Prebisch's best-known articulation of regional economic integration is in Latin American Common Market, published by ECLAC in 1959. The neoclassical theory of economic integration is synonymous with that of customs-union theory developed by the US economist Jacob Viner (1950), which distinguished between trade creation and diversion.
