SANTIAGO de CHILE, 22 April 2010: The recent global crisis has left a historical void that offers the opportunity to strengthen national capabilities and redefine the international insertion of countries in the region, said Argentine economist and academic Aldo Ferrer in delivering the Ninth Raúl Prebisch Lecture at the headquarter of ECLAC, Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.
– The collapse of money and the profound imbalance of the system after the crisis has left a historical void in which economic orthodoxy has been discredited, revealing its inability to generate viable national policies, asserted Ferrer in his presentation “Development and Globalization: Prebisch’s Approach Today”.
In her welcoming words, ECLAC Executive Secretary Alicia Bárcena coincided with Ferrer in that the development model that has reigned in the region over the past 25 years “seems to have been disfigured after the recent financial and economic global crisis”.
– It’s not about more or less regulation. It’s about a model of development that lay bare all of its defects, said Bárcena.
– The fundamentalist view that only one economic policy is possible suggested that the State was an obstacle for development that had to be combated, shrunk and pushed into the corner. Today we realize that it was an enormous mistake, she asserted.
In this scenario, the main conditions proposed by former ECLAC Executive Secretary Raúl Prebisch (1950-1963) as indispensable for attaining national development are fully valid today, agreed Bárcena and Ferrer.
The Raúl Prebisch Memorial Lecture Series was established in April 2001 to commemorate the 100 year anniversary of the former ECLAC Executive Secretary’s birth. Each year, a prominent Latin American intellectual is invited to deliver a lecture in his or her area of expertise.
