Introduction

One of the central preoccupations of the international research and policy agenda after the end of the Second World War was to come to terms with underdevelopment. Arguably, one of the most influential schools of thought on development during this period was the Latin American Structuralist Approach (LASA). Development theory and policy was shaped mostly by the analysis of the economic and social processes of production and knowledge creation. It followed a long-standing tradition that advocated that wealth originates from immaterial forces (creativity and knowledge) and that the accumulation of assets occurs through the incorporation of new technologies and innovation (Reinert and Daastøl 2004). Structural change and the connection between technical change and structural change were central to such developmental lines of argument.

There were two central arguments of LASA. First, the ideas that technical change plays a significant role in explaining development and underdevelopment and that specific knowledge and policies towards structural change were necessary to overcome backwardness. Technical change is a crucial component of an explanation of capitalism's evolution and in the determination of historical processes through which hierarchies of regions and countries are formed.

Second, the proposition that underdeveloped countries were significantly different from industrial advanced ones. Hence, they could not follow the same paths towards development and that the catching-up idea had to be reconsidered. In the words of one of the leading Latin American structuralist economists, ‘underdevelopment is … an autonomous historical process, and not stages that economies that already achieved a superior degree of development had necessarily to go through’ (Furtado 1961, 180).