Christopher R.W. Dietrich

“Rather, it favored the technological advancement and industrial productivity of the nations of the center, which in turn forged a potent legacy in which the value of raw materials declined as productivity rose. The allegedly “natural” operation of trade was anything but, Prebisch said. Comparative advantage was not a scientific law with absolute or universal scope. Instead it was an outcome of policy derived from past power relations. It followed that the wealth of the center had less to do with the benefits derived from the expansion of commerce than with the inequitable structure of that commerce.33”
― Christopher R.W. Dietrich, Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization