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Raúl Prebisch was one of the leading personalities in the twentieth century and a key figure in Latin America's development, so it is perhaps surprising that until now there has been no major biography written about him. Edgar Dosman has filled this gap with a biography that is meticulously researched and a pleasure to read even if at the end we are still left with many unanswered questions about this enigmatic figure.
Prebisch was born in Tucumán, Argentina in 1901 to an immigrant father from Germany and an Argentine mother who, although relatively humble herself, was related to the Uriburu family - one of the grandest in the country. Prebisch was never fully accepted by these grandees, though he did benefit in a number of ways from the connection after he had established himself in Buenos Aires.
The move to the capital from Tucumán was due to higher education, and Prebisch displayed a precocious talent in the newly established economics department of Buenos Aires University. Prebisch's early publications while still at university brought him to the attention of the country's political and financial elite, however, and he never finished his studies, nor did he subsequently obtain a PhD. Thus, in many ways Prebisch was self-taught as an economist, and this may help to explain some of the ambiguities in his later research that have puzzled scholars of Latin American development.
Prebisch's early career was relentlessly orthodox, and he formed an early conviction - perhaps reinforced by the experience of his German relatives in the Weimar Republic - that inflation was a curse that needed to be eradicated at almost any cost. This may seem odd given his later association with a style of development that contributed to high rates of inflation in Latin America,...