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The Central Bank of Argentina began its activities in May 1935 surrounded by controversy. The Bank was created as a result of a mission led by the expert from the Bank of England, Sir Otto Niemeyer. The foreign involvement in the origins of the bank was not welcome to a good part of the Argentine society. Finally, the project for a central bank approved by the Argentine Congress was not the one proposed by Sir Otto Niemeyer, but a version of it that contained crucial modifications introduced by Raúl Prebisch. The aim of this work is to highlight Prebisch’s ideas on monetary and banking matters by analyzing the differences with the ideas of Sir Otto Niemeyer around monetary policy and the characteristics of the future Central Bank of Argentina. Even if there were almost no direct debates between them, there were different visions and indirect contentions that can be traced in the writings of both, which on the side of Prebisch were published in the Revista Económica del Banco de la Nación Argentina and some government documents, and on Niemeyer’s side can be traced in some writings and correspondence regarding his visit to Argentina, held in the archives of the Bank of England.

Traditionally, monetary policy in Latin America followed the recommendations of the missions of the monetary “doctors” who defended an independent central bank and a pro-cyclical monetary policy, adhering to the automatic adjustment of the gold standard. A key function of central banks was to support fiscal stability. The effects of the Great Depression and its aftermath in the periphery countries questioned these recommendations and gave way to a shift in monetary policy. An illustrative example is provided by the creation of the Central Bank of the Argentina Republic (BCRA) under the auspices of Raúl Prebisch, and the technical assistance missions of the United States Federal Reserve to several Latin American countries some of which were led by Robert Triffin. Prebisch actively participated in mission to Paraguay and the Dominican Republic bringing the experience he had acquired as director of the BCRA and the tools devised to adapt monetary policy to a changing external context and circumstances. The use of the discount window and exchange controls, among other instruments, was seen in this new view as necessary to pursue counter-cyclical policies and to provide support for industrialization and full employment in the periphery.

This study aims to offer a critique of the theory of the deterioration in terms of trade, developed by Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer.

As an example of the theory’s shortcomings, the case of Argentina’s import substitution model is analyzed.

This study demonstrates how a misunderstanding of the influence of price variability in international trade may lead to the mistaken conclusion that protectionist measures must be enforced to achieve growth and prosperity.

This is the first study that criticizes the Prebisch-Singer theory of the deterioration in the terms of trade from an Austrian economics.

The objective of this paper is to focus on the evolution of development economics, both as an academic discipline and as a subject taught at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, at the University of Manchester, from approximately the early‐1950s onwards. It is not a history or survey of development economics per se but concentrates rather on the richness and variety of the contributions made by a number of eminent economists while they were in the Department of Economics (since 1993, the School of Economic Studies), to both the development of theory and to empirical analysis and to policy prescription, and to the teaching of development economics. Only a limited account is given of the work of these economists once they were no longer in Manchester.

The Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC) was created in the post-war, when Latin-American countries were facing disequilibrium in international trade, capital shortage and rising inflation. The ECLAC intended to aid in the definition of a development strategy that could deal with these issues. Between the first ECLAC publications, three of them are considered to be “the trilogy that founds the structuralist theory” (Bielschowsky, 2011, p. 8): the Latin-American Manifesto, the Economic Survey of Latin America-1949, and Theoretical and Practical Problems of Economic Growth. These documents set the center-periphery relation as a conditioning feature for the behavior of national economies, and describe the trajectory of terms of trade deterioration and its consequences to peripheral nations. The objective here is to argue that this trilogy contains an analysis of inflation in underdevelopment, and anticipates the main elements of what would later be called the structuralist theory of inflation. The introduction depicts the context that originated the ECLAC and the debates on how to foster post-war Latin-American development. The second section analyzes the Singer Report and the Latin-American Manifesto with regard to the causes of inflation in peripheral nations. The third section discusses the Economic Survey of Latin America – 1949, with a focus on the consequences of technology incorporation in underdeveloped structures. Section four explores “Theoretical and Practical Problems of Economic Growth” and the issue of inelastic production. Section five surveys the incorporation of Prebisch’s approach into the Brazilian debate. The conclusion sets Prebisch’s contribution in perspective with other structuralist authors.

This chapter intends to make an extended periodization of economic discussions that have taken place in Latin America throughout its history. The task is ambitious; we begin, however, with the periodization elaborated by Oreste Popescu, which we then expand and modify. As educators, we still have to work on the training of Latin American economists, due to the lack of knowledge they have not only about the region as a whole, but also of the economic debates that took place within it. This work is a first approximation and provocation aimed to jumpstart a discussion on these issues.

This article provides a detailed investigation of how Lewis revisited classical and Marxian concepts such as productive/unproductive labor, economic surplus, subsistence wages, reserve army, and capital accumulation in his investigation of economic development. The Lewis 1954 development model is compared to other models advanced at the time by Harrod, Domar, Swan, Kaldor, Solow, von Neumann, Nurkse, Rosenstein-Rodan, Myint, and others. Lewis applied the notion of economic duality to open and closed economies.

Paul Samuelson was attracted to the irregular economic development pattern of some South American countries because of the links between economic performance and political factors. He discussed the influence of “populist democracy” on Argentina’s relative economic stagnation, which, he argued in the 1970s and early 1980s, served as a dangerous paradigm for the American economy under stagflation. Stagflation phenomena marked the end of Samuelson’s “neoclassical synthesis.” Moreover, he applied his concept of “capitalist fascism” to deal with military dictatorships in Brazil and (especially) in Chile. The Brazilian translation of his Economics in 1973 brought about a correspondence with Brazilian economists about the “fascist” features of the regime. The main variable behind the South American economic and politically unstable processes discussed by Samuelson was economic inequality, which became also a conspicuous feature of the American economy since the adoption of market-based policies in the 1980s and after.

This paper analyzes the standpoint of Albert O. Hirschman in the structuralist–monetarist debate that took place in Latin America during the 1950s and 1960s. It claims that Hirschman had many affinities with the structuralist approach, in virtue of his methodological stance and of his view of the role to be performed by economic advisers in foreign countries. Similar to the structuralists, Hirschman did not make the control of inflation a central tenet of his development theory; also like them, he dissented from the orthodox approach. However, Hirschman did not take a clear-cut side on the debate, choosing, instead, to act as a go-between.