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The Influence of Raul Prebisch on Economic Policy-Making in Argentina, 1950–1962

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Kathryn Sikkink
Kathryn Sikkink*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
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Se me elogió y se me criticó duramente por haber preconizado la industrialización para América Latina, menos en mi país. El país vivía en las nubes. En estos años no se había estudiado las ideas de CEPAL en Argentina. [¿Por qué?] Yo no estuve aquí en el país, así no sé, pero tal vez por oposición a mí. Tal vez.

Raúl Prebisch

Interview, 23 October 1985

In much of Latin America during the 1950s, Raúl Prebisch, then Executive Secretary of the Comisión Económica para América Latina (CEPAL, known in English as the Economic Commission for Latin America, or ECLA), was recognized as a progressive and innovative development theorist and policy activist. In certain government circles in the United States, meanwhile, he was viewed with suspicion as a leftist critic of standard economic wisdom. Yet in his home country of Argentina during the same period, Prebisch was commonly identified with both conservative groups and liberal economic thought.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , 1988 , pp. 91 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by Latin American Research Review

Footnotes

*

This article was written while I was a visiting fellow at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies in 1986–87. It draws on research conducted in Argentina and Chile, which was assisted by a grant from the Joint Committee on Latin America of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies (with funds provided by the Ford Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) and a grant from the Doherty Foundation. I wish to thank the team at the Centro de Estudios de Estado y Sociedad (CEDES), especially Marcelo Cavarozzi and Catalina Smulovitz, for their help during my research in Argentina. I also wish to thank Albert O. Hirschman, Margaret Keck, Abraham Lowenthal, Joseph Grunwald, and David Pollack for their comments on an earlier version of the article presented at the Latin American Studies Association International Congress in Boston in October 1986.

References

Notes

1. Prebisch was one of the foremost theorists of developmentalism, which called for rapid industrialization of peripheral economies through import substitution and development of basic industries. The originator of the theory of declining terms of trade for primary products, Prebisch argued that rapid industrialization supported by vigorous state action was necessary to overcome underdevelopment. He has been credited with generating much of what was later called CEPAL doctrine. While other CEPAL theorists expanded and applied these ideas, much of the doctrine was already present in the pathbreaking document that Prebisch prepared for CEPAL in 1949. See Raúl Prebisch, The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems (New York: UN, ECLA, 1950).

2. As Prebisch recognized, “la tesis de la CEPAL sobre industrialización ha sido presentado por Perón en términos muy parecidos. … [T]odos [Peronismo, CEPAL y desarrollismo] tienen el común denominador de haber comprendido que había que industrializar. …” Interview with Prebisch, 23 Oct. 1985, Buenos Aires. During this interview in the CEPAL offices in Buenos Aires, Prebisch spoke lucidly of the past, with a fine memory for details, especially for old battles over ideas and policies. Prebisch died six months later in Santiago, Chile, at the age of eighty-five.

3. A Fantasia Organizada (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1985), 99–103.

4. Ibid., 101.

5. “La CEPAL nunca influyó demasiado en Argentina. Esto es una impresión que uno tiene y siempre escucha de otros. Yo no sé si pueda haber influido el hecho de que Prebisch siempre estuvo un poco de contramano en Argentina. … [T]al vez no fue la única razón, pero esa pueda haber sido una razón por la cual la CEPAL nunca penetró mucho en Argentina. Penetró más en otros países de la región que en Argentina.” Interview with Norberto González in Santiago, Chile, 13 Sept. 1985. David Bruce's comparative study of CEPAL-trained técnicos also indicated that CEPAL's ideas were more influential in Brazil than in Argentina. In his interviews, CEPAL-trained Argentines reported that CEPAL missions and publications had little profound influence in Argentina. “This is in keeping with the conclusions of the literature and of the ECLA staff members consulted in Santiago.” See David Cameron Bruce, “The U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and National Development Policies: A Study of Noncoercive Influence,” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1977, 145.

6. It is also true that CEPAL trained fewer students in Argentina than in most other countries in Latin America. Between 1955 and 1970, CEPAL trained 141 Argentines in in-country training courses, as compared with 1,330 Brazilians, 434 Mexicans, 333 Bolivians, 333 Peruvians, 278 Colombians, 230 Uruguayans, 192 Central Americans, and 181 Dominicans during the same period. Of all the countries where in-country training courses were held, only Cuba, Ecuador, and Chile had fewer students trained by CEPAL than Argentina. See Interim Report of the Latin American Institute for Economic and Social Planning, 1962-1971, Santiago, August 1971, 11. CEPAL did not organize more in-country training courses in Argentina because it was not invited by the government to provide these courses. Thus one must attribute lack of CEPAL influence not only to lack of CEPAL training but to the disinterest or unwillingness of Argentine governments and institutions to request CEPAL training.

7. Most of the material in these two paragraphs draws on Joseph Love, “Raúl Prebisch and the Origin of the Doctrine of Unequal Exchange,” LARR 15, no. 3 (1980):45-72.

8. Interview, Prebisch.

9. Raúl Prebisch, La crisis del desarrollo argentino (Buenos Aires: Ateneo, 1986), 150–51.

10. Love, “Prebisch and Unequal Exchange,” 57.

11. A softening of the Peronist position toward Prebisch occurred in the early 1950s. Some authors have suggested that Perón invited Prebisch to write an economic plan for his government. Prebisch, however, denied in the interview that he was ever invited to write a plan for Perón, although Perón did offer to return his job at the university.

12. Norberto González and Aldo Ferrer, for example, were both Prebisch's students at the university. Ferrer recalls first hearing Prebisch's discussion of the center-periphery system in his university lectures. Interview with Aldo Ferrer in Buenos Aires, 27 Nov. 1985.

13. Prior to 1959, the School of Economics at the Universidad de Buenos Aires trained all its students simultaneously as accountants and economists, at both undergraduate and graduate levels, with emphasis on public accounting and public law. Prebisch stated baldly in 1948, “Esta Facultad, no obstante su pomposo nombre de Facultad de Ciencias Económicas, … no forma economistas.” See his “Introducción al curso de dinámica económica,” Revista de la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas 1, no. 1 (Mar. 1948):448. In 1948 Prebisch participated actively in a committee proposing a curriculum change that would have separated the accounting and economics specializations within the department. But the changes were not adopted until 1958 and 1959, when new curricula and texts were introduced at the School of Economics. This was the first time that CEPAL material was incorporated systematically into courses at the university. Interview with Daniel Vilas, an Argentine economist who collaborated on the curriculum changes while a student at the university and later helped organize development courses at the School of Economics. The interview took place on 3 July 1985 in Buenos Aires.

14. Although the “Prebisch Plan” was actually a set of recommended policies and Prebisch frequently denied that it was a plan, it was usually referred to as a plan in Argentina. For this reason, I decided to retain this usage.

15. Raúl Prebisch, Informe preliminar acerca de la situación económica, Buenos Aires, 26 Oct. 1955, 9. This report was probably published by the Ministerio de Hacienda. Interview with Adolfo Dorfman, a member of the CEPAL mission to Argentina, 6 June 1985, Buenos Aires.

16. Informe preliminar acerca de la situación económica, 26 Oct. 1955; Moneda sana o inflación incontenible; and Plan de restablecimiento económico, 7 Jan. 1956. According to Prebisch, only the third document was the “genuine and definitive Prebisch Plan.” In the minds of his supporters and critics, however, all three documents formed the Prebisch Plan. The second report became the best known, possibly due to its dramatic title.

17. See the section entitled “Historia secreta del Plan Prebisch” in El Plan Prebisch (5th ed.; Buenos Aires: Peña Lillo, 1984), 137–66.

18. Informe preliminar, 8.

19. Prebisch commented on the “desastre económico que ha vivido el país … en los últimos diez años” and to “aquel estupendo Señor Miranda, que tanto daño hizo al país,” referring to Perón's first president of the Banco Central. Prebisch ended one presentation with an emotional evocation of General Lonardi, “aquella figura noble y austera que junto con otros compañeros de armas desenvainó su espada para derribar una dictadura y no para levantar otra en este suelo sufrido de América Latina.” See La Agrupación Reformista de Graduados en Ciencias Económicas, Mesa redonda of 28 Nov. 1955, published 19 Dec. 1955 (Buenos Aires: n.p.), pp. 5, 8.

20. For example, see Arturo Jauretche, El Plan Prebisch; also Isaac Libenson, Cara y ceca del Informe Prebisch, (published by the author, n.d.). The revolutionary socialist newspaper Lucha Obrera said of Prebisch, “… no podemos decir que sea un agente de imperialismo porque es el imperialismo en persona.” See “¡Abajo el Plan Prebisch! La oligarquía y el imperialismo no ganaron la última batalla,” Lucha Obrera (Buenos Aires), 10 Nov. 1955, p. 1.

21. Tulio Halperin Donghi, Historia argentina: la democracia de masas (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1983), 90–91.

22. Comisión Asesora Honoraria de Economía y Finanzas, “Dictamen sobre el informe Moneda sana o inflación incontenible,” mimeo, Buenos Aires, 20 Jan. 1956, 12.

23. Anales de la Sociedad Rural Argentina 11 (Nov. 1955):479.

24. The policymakers of the Revolución Libertadora dismantled the Instituto Argentino de Promoción del Intercambio (IAPI), returned the genealogical animal registers nationalized by Perón to the Sociedad Rural Argentina, and renewed its twenty-year lease on the Palermo fairgrounds and exhibition halls where the annual rural exposition was held. See Jorge Newton, Historia de la Sociedad Rural Argentina (Buenos Aires: Boncourt, 1966), 255.

25. Gary Wynia, Argentina in the Postwar Era: Politics and Economic Policy Making in a Divided Society (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978), 157–58.

26. In 1958, under the Frondizi government, the CGE was again allowed to function.

27. Unión Industrial Argentina, Memoria y balance, 1956-1957 (Buenos Aires: n.p., 1957), 22–24.

28. Aldo Ferrer, “Notas sobre el Informe Prebisch” (n.d.), Frondizi Archives, Centro de Estudios Nacionales, Buenos Aires. Specifically, Ferrer supported six points: strengthening agricultural production; modifying the exchange rate (as long as measures were taken to blunt the impact on popular consumption); developing basic industries and promoting industrial exports; constructing gas and oil pipelines; enacting anti-inflationary measures; and liberalizing the economy while retaining a state role in the overall direction of economic development. But Ferrer argued that the Radical party, although not opposed to foreign investment in well-defined areas, did not believe that such investment was essential to Argentine development. Similarly, although he did not oppose the agrarian recommendations, he suggested that increased agricultural production was insufficient and that an effective agrarian reform was necessary for development. He also recommended that the government subsidize basic food items to avoid price increases for the popular sectors.

29. Aldo Ferrer, “El Informe Prebisch y el problema económico argentino” (undated), Frondizi Archives, Centro de Estudios Nacionales, Buenos Aires. Scalabrini Ortiz's comments are signed and dated 13 Dec. 1955.

30. In return, the government appointed a number of sympathetic members of the Balbinista wing of the party to positions in the government, such as Radical economist Eugenio Blanco as Minister of Economics.

31. For more on the division within the Radical party, see Ricardo Gallo, 1956-1958: Balbín, Frondizi y la división del radicalismo (Buenos Aires: Belgrano, 1983).

32. Reading the pages of Qué published in 1956–57, one finds Prebisch in the pictures more often than any other single figure, even though he spent more time in Santiago than in Buenos Aires during that period.

33. Marcelo Cavarozzi, Sindicatos y política en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Estudios CEDES, 1984), 90.

34. See Pablo Gerchunoff, “Política económica de la Revolución Libertadora,” mimeo, Instituto Torcuato di Tella, n.d., 2.

35. E. Eshag and R. Thorp, “Economic Policies in Argentina in the Postwar Years,” Oxford University Institute of Economics and Statistics Bulletin 27, no. 1 (Feb. 1965):14.

36. For the recommendation, see the Plan de reestablecimiento económico, 38.

37. Carlos Díaz Alejandro argued that INTA activities led over time to technological improvement and productivity gains in the rural sector. See his Essays on the Economic History of the Argentine Republic (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), 190–91, 194.

38. The international terms of trade fell rapidly during this period, and by 1957, they were 13 percent below the 1955 level, 36 percent below 1950, and 44 percent below 1948. See Gerchunoff, “Política económica,” 4, 6.

39. For example, see Jauretche, Plan Prebisch; and Tomás Economicus, Radiografía del Informe Prebisch (Buenos Aires: Realidad Económica, 1955), 11–12, 19.

40. For example, a transcript of a speech by Minister of Economics Blanco made to the Escuela Superior de Guerra in April 1956 on budget policy, public debt, and the national economy spent nineteen pages and twenty-one graphs elaborating the failures of Peronist economic policy and the negative economic legacy of the previous regime but only seven uninspiring pages outlining what the new government was offering as an alternative. See Eugenio A. Blanco, La política presupuestaria, la deuda pública y la economía nacional, speech made 17 Apr. 1956 (Buenos Aires: Ministerio de Hacienda de la Nación, 1956).

41. Interview, Prebisch.

42. Norberto González, current executive director of CEPAL, did his first work with CEPAL as a consultant on this study. Other members of the CEPAL team included Adolfo Dorfman, Roque Carranza, and Ricardo Cibotti.

43. An English summary of the three-volume report can be found in “The Problems of Economic Development in Argentina,” Economic Bulletin for Latin America 4 (Mar. 1959):13-24.

44. Rogelio Frigerio, written responses to interview questions, p. 11, received 15 July 1985. Although I briefly interviewed Rogelio Frigerio and Arturo Frondizi, both preferred to prepare written responses to my interview questions.

45. Prebisch recommended that the Banco Industrial (established in 1944) be transformed into an autonomous institution called the Banco de Desarrollo Económico, which would undertake only medium- and long-term investment financing. The recommendations were adopted but were soon reversed by the Frondizi administration. Banco Industrial de la República Argentina, Memoria y Balance, 1958 (Buenos Aires, 1959), p. 11.

46. The main exception was the Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA), which was previously discussed.

47. Frondizi justified his change of position on the state petroleum monopoly with the following reasons: “Cuando llegué al gobierno, me enfrenté a una realidad que no correspondía a esa postura teórica [that of Petroléo y política] por dos razones. Primero, porque el Estado no tenía los recursos necesarios para explotar por sí sólo nuestro petróleo; y segundo, porque la inmediata y urgente necesidad de sustituir nuestras importaciones de combustible no dejaba margen de tiempo para esperar que el gobierno reuniera los recursos financieros y técnicos.” See Arturo Frondizi, Petróleo y nación (Buenos Aires: Transición, 1963), 8.

48. One of the bitterest attacks on Frondizi's petroleum policy was written by his vice-president, Alejandro Gómez, after he was forced to resign. See Gómez, Política de entrega (Buenos Aires: Peña Lillo, 1963).

49. By national integration, the desarrollistas meant not only the integrated industrial development of the country and the rearrangement of its trading patterns with industrialized nations but also a more metaphysical emergence of an integrated “nation” with “una unidad histórica tradicional y conciencia histórica comunitaria.” See Rogelio Frigerio, Hacer el desarrollo o remendar la vieja estructura (Buenos Aires: Editorial Desarrollo, 1965), 13, 15. One root of this conflict between CEPAL and the desarrollistas appears to have been an alleged statement by a CEPAL expert on integration suggesting a logical regional division of industries that would assign Brazil the role of regional producer of steel and steel products. This idea was unacceptable to Argentine nationalists and desarrollistas because of the longstanding economic and military rivalry between the two countries.

50. Frigerio, written responses to questions.

51. CEPAL offered two in-country training courses in Argentina at the School of Economics of the Universidad de Buenos Aires in 1958 and 1959.

52. Interview with Alberto Petrecolla, Director of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, 2 July 1985.

53. Interview with Prebisch.

54. Interview with Norberto González. The document prepared by the Ferrer team was called “Informe sobre la situación económica nacional: análisis preliminar de los principales problemas y medidas propuestas.”

55. Because Frigerio was unacceptable to military leaders and many of his own party members, Frondizi named Donanto del Carril, a noneconomist and loyal Radical party member, to head the Ministry of Economics and installed Frigerio as a special presidential secretary for economic and social affairs. Frigerio became the real force behind economic policy-making.

56. The members of the Junta de Planificación included Norberto González, Ricardo Cibotti, Eric Calcagno, Federico Herschel, and Samuel Itzcovich. This group of Argentine economists was one of the most familiar and sympathetic with the ideas of CEPAL. The junta undertook an ambitious program of study and reform, focusing on an area within their jurisdiction, land taxation in the province. The early articles on agrarian reform and land-tax reform by the junta were published in a journal that formed the initial volumes of Desarrollo Económico, one of the most prominent journals in Latin America and a forum for Cepalista ideas. The land-tax plan provoked a strong reaction from landed interests in the province and opposition from the central government. Frondizi's group believed that the junta's land-tax reform fueled the opposition's attack on the central government and distracted attention from more pressing governmental priorities on economic policy, especially petroleum policy. Interview with Oscar Alende, 27 Nov. 1985, in Banfield, Argentina. Governor Alende eventually felt obliged to request Ferrer's resignation, and the Junta de Planificación closed shop. González, Cibotti, and Calcagno later went to work for CEPAL. At the initiative of Alende and his economic team, an interprovincial organization was set up in 1959 called the Consejo Federal de Inversiones (CFI). Like the Junta de Planificación, the CFI maintained a good relationship with CEPAL. According to Eric Calcagno, who left the junta to become secretary general of the CFI, the latter was envisioned as a “Cepalito” that would provide technical assistance in developing the Argentine provinces. Interview with Eric Calcagno, 11 July 1985, in Buenos Aires. Although the CFI was an interprovincial organization, rather than a national one, it became the most permanent planning organization in the country, with a high degree of administrative continuity that was unusual in Argentina. See Antonio Federico Moreno, El planeamiento y nuestra Argentina (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1978), 111; and “La historia del CFI,” Todo Es Historia, no. 106 (Mar. 1976):32.

57. Rogelio Frigerio, Estatuto del subdesarrollo: los corrientes del pensamiento económico argentino (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Librería del Jurista, 1983), 16.

58. “No obstante esos trabajos, se nos vinculó con alguna frecuencia a esa escuela [CEPAL]. Creo que esto no fue hecho de manera inocente, pues a quienes rechazaban nuestras ideas les resultaba más cómodo asimilarnos a un pensamiento extraño y combatir contra una caricatura ideológica que hacerlo con nuestras rigurosas proposiciones.” Frigerio, written responses to interview questions.