ABSTRACT
The writings of Raul Prebisch, when he was secretary-general of the Economic Commission for Latin America, can be said to have founded both the unequal exchange wing of neo-Ricardian trade theory as well as the neo-Marxist 'dependency' school. In an article first published in 1950 Prebisch claimed that 'while the centres kept the whole benefit of the technical development of their industries, the peripheral countries transferred to them a share of the fruits of their own technical progress' (Prebisch, 1962, 5). This division of the world into north and south is central, as we shall see, to the unequal exchange of Arghiri Emmanuel, but the centre-periphery division is also a main focus of the neo-Marxist 'dependency' writings of Paul Baran, Osvaldo Sunkel, Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein and Gunder Frank. The latter (the dependency school) is discussed in Chapter 5 because its analysis depends heavily on 'non-economic' factors, by contrast with the approach of Prebisch and Emmanuel for whom imperialism is associated with relatively free trade.
