1 Forthcoming in Esteban Pérez-Caldentey and Matias Vernengo Ideas, Policies and Economic Development in the Americas Series: Routledge Studies in Development Economics THE CONTINUING RELEVANCE OF THE TERMS OF TRADE AND INDUSTRIALIZATION DEBATES José Antonio Ocampo and María Angela Parra * Raul Prebisch’s conception of the world economy as a centre-periphery system became perhaps the most distinctive feature of Latin American structuralist thinking in the early post-war years. Prebisch argued that the asymmetries between the centre and the periphery of the world economy destroyed the basic premise of the international division of labor, making the transmission of technological change in the world economy “relatively slow and uneven”. Thus, for developing countries, industrialization was not an end in itself, but the principal means at their disposal to obtain a share of the benefits of technological progress and gradually raise the standard of living of their population. 1 This was a very influential idea in practice, as it justified both industrialization in the developing world as the only way to overcome economic dependency, and the need to reform the international economic system, to break its asymmetric features and facilitate industrialization in the periphery. 2 An element of this view of the world system was the hypothesis that the terms of trade of commodities—and thus of developing countries, which at the time were basically commodity-dependent in their export structure—tended to experience a long-term decline. This thesis, launched in the aftermath of the Second World War by both Raul * United Nations Under-Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA) and Adviser to the Under-Secretary General, respectively. 1 Prebisch (1950), reproduced in Prebisch (1962), p. 1. 2 The United Nations, through the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) (later ECLAC, when the Caribbean joined the Commission) and the Department of Economic Affairs, were at the centre of this and parallel conceptual developments, with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) becoming from its creation in 1962 the centre of the debates on reform of the international economic system.