ABSTRACT
The idea of speeding up development through tighter international economic integration is one that is essentially as old as Economics is as a discipline. Beginning in the 1970s, the economics mainstream staged a neoclassical resurgence. This chapter outlines Raul Prebisch's conceptualization of the development process. It describes his campaign for a tiered system of differential treatments in favour of underdeveloped countries in the multilateral trading system that supposedly would facilitate their pursuit of policies. ISI was already being implemented in Latin America when Prebisch started to provide theoretical justifications for it in the late 1940s. The term 'technological density' is not one that Prebisch employed very often in his work, at least not explicitly. Issues such as the use of investment measures and the protection of intellectual property rights were only introduced into the agenda of the Uruguay Round in 1986, the year that Prebisch passed away.
