ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the main concerns of the developing countries in the fields of the commodity trade, the access of their manufactures to the markets of the industrialized countries, and their share in world industrialization. The approach to development in the 1950s had the drawback of being profoundly unhistorical. It implied that development constitutes a process which occurs independently in different countries at different moments in time and consists in reproducing, under different circumstances, the model coined by the countries which were the protagonists of the Industrial Revolution. The tariff reductions agreed on by the developed countries in the context of the multilateral trade negotiations mainly benefit advanced technology products, which are fundamentally negotiated among industrialized countries, while higher tariffs are kept for the manufactures exported by the developing countries. The loss of competitiveness of some sectors of industry in the developed countries is the result of a combination of factors.
