[...] Until the early decades of the twentieth century, the dominant classes in Argentina held no brief for nation building. The oligarchs, the haute portenos, ran the country with an iron fist and held their own wealth in European banks (which meant that they preferred fiscal policies that favored Europe's currencies against Argentina' s economic strength) . This detachment of the elite fueled the growth o f a socialist movement, led by Juan B. Justo and the trade unions, and it angered patriotic sec­tions of the elite [...]

[...] the basis of trade had to be altered . It could not be premised on the idea that some states are naturally good at being harvesters of low-value raw materials and others are naturally proficient at being producers of high-value-added finished products. The theory of comparative advantage, Prebisch claimed, stifles genuine economic development. And further, since modernization theory promotes the view that national income and investment capital must be raised from the export of raw materials, it will only entrap the new nations more deeply. As Prebisch and the development economists saw it, the import of manufactured goods and the export of cheap raw materials will continue to drain capital and fail to enable the conduct of technological improvements toward socioeconomic development. The cycle of dependency would intensify rather than break.

To counter this, Prebisch argued that raw material exporting states should create some mechanism to develop a domestic industry, and absent outright grants, the best approach would be legal-political. The new nations should use tariffs to make imports prohibitive (what be came known as "import-substitution industrialization" or, in another guise, the "infant industry" thesis) . Prices in the core remained high partly because of the political role of trade unions and industrial monop­olies. The periphery needed its own political strategy, and this would have to be in the realm of interstate trade.

The development economists rejected Ricardo's occlusion of colonialism, and the reliance on strategies that freed up the First World to donate aid rather than rethink its own finan­cial and political dominance.

This did not mean that every region should produce everything for itself and therefore live in a state of pure autarky. On the contrary, trade is crucial because some regions have smaller markets than others, and raw materials and agricultural lands are not evenly distributed along national lines.

The First World took umbrage at the creation of the UNCTAD.

[...] Within the United Nations there was often talk of land reform, and there was some discussion of the distorted or even corrupt use of the surplus, but hardly any concern given to it or the conflict among the dif­ferent classes for use of the surplus (and for the surplus value drawn from the workers) . The main problem was to raise capital for the Third World's development, and the Prebisch position also ignored or down­played the fundamental role of financial capital over the world's econ­omy. The structural problems of landlordism, domestic class struggles, and the better use of the economic surplus already produced within a national economy as well as the problem of the surplus value stolen from the workers in the normal course of capitalism, rarely came up for discussion at the United Nations. It had already become sufficient to be critical of the First World alone, which became a shield that protected the national bourgeoisie from criticism for its own lack of imagination and self-sacrifice. In other words, development theory and public policy emphasized economic growth as an end in itself without a built-in con­sideration for equity.