75 years of ECLAC and ECLAC thinking

The Commission worked to achieve development in the region by promoting State-led industrialization policies to reduce the gaps between developed and developing countries.

The publication The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems, written by Raúl Prebisch, laid the groundwork for the Commission’s approach to analysis of and policy implications for the context of the region.

It described the global economy as a bipolar system comprising the centre and the periphery. The countries in the centre were developed, industrialized economies that propagated technical progress; the countries in the periphery, the group into which Latin American economies fell, were underdeveloped, specialized in the production and export of commodities, and had little technological content in their productive structure. Prebisch argued that overcoming underdevelopment (or peripheral status) required the industrialization of Latin America.

This would require, in an initial phase, the deliberate support of the State, followed by a second phase focused on the production of capital goods and the promotion of regional economic and trade integration.  (Mercado Común Latinoamericano: conferencia del Dr. Prebisch, celebrada en el Banco Nacional de México. Prebisch, Raúl, 1959)

In 1954, ECLAC presented the document International Cooperation in Latin American Development Policy, with six institutional objectives: tax and agrarian reform, technical cooperation, rapid industrialization, development planning, trade revitalization through the promotion of regional integration, and new approaches to foreign investment.

During this period, ECLAC was at the forefront of Latin American economic thinking and shaped a new vision of development. The Latin American and Caribbean Demographic Centre (CELADE), now Population Division of ECLAC, was founded in the mid-1950s, when the region was becoming aware of the need to collect systematized and periodic population data.

In 1951, the ECLAC subregional headquarters in Mexico was established to act as a coordinating and consultative body for Central American and Caribbean countries.