Dr. Raúl Prebisch (1901 – 1986) was an Argentine economist known for his contribution to structuralist economics , in particular the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis that formed the basis of economic dependency theory. He is sometimes considered to be a neo-Marxist though this label is misleading.

He was born in Tucumán, Argentina and studied at the University of Buenos Aires, where he later taught. As a young man his writing was marked by a complete adherence to the beliefs of orthodox and neoclassical economics along the lines of John Maynard Keynes. This belief was supported by the spectacular economic growth of Argentina from the 1860s to 1920s as the country exported large amount of beef and wheat to the world power Great Britain. However, by the 1930s the Great Depression and the growing economic dominance of the United States, which exported beef and wheat rather than buying them, had devastated the Argentinian economy.

The plight of Argentina forced Prebisch to reexamine the principle of comparative advantage described by David Ricardo, marking the creation of a new school of economic thought. Prebisch separated out the purely theoretical aspects of economics from the actual practice of trade and the power structures that underlie trading institutions and agreements. His resulting division of the world into the economic "center", consisting of nations such as the U.S. and western European nations, and the "periphery", consisting of every other region, remains used to this day. As president of Argentina's Central Bank he noticed that during the Great Depression the prices of primary products, such as agricultural goods, fell much more than the prices of manufactured secondary products. However, he and his colleagues were unable to specify the exact mechanism for the difference, beyond noting that supply conditions of primary and secondary goods were different in that while farmers planted the same amount every year regardless of the price they would get, manufacturers were able to reduce or increase capacity to respond to expected changes in demand.

However, these ideas remained unformed until he was appointed director of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in 1948. In 1950, he released a study The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems that stated what is now known as the Singer-Prebisch Thesis, a major contribution to economic thought. German economist Hans Singer had separately arrived at a similar conclusion as Prebisch at roughly the same time. The thesis states that in the present world system where the periphery produces primary goods to export to the center, and the center produces secondary goods for export to the periphery, all of the benefits of international trade will go to the center. While the 1950 study has been shown to be substantially flawed, the central insight appears to be correct.

After this finding, ECLAC became the center of Third World activism in the UN, giving birth to the Latin American school of structuralist economics . At ECLAC, Prebisch became the chief proponent of import substitution industrialization (ISI), in which a nation isolates itself from outside trade and tries to industrialize using only its domestic market as an engine. As ECLAC became the target of increasingly harsh criticisms, Prebisch left.

Between 1964 and 1969 he served as the founding secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). During this time, economists at ECLAC developed an extension of Prebisch's thoughts on structuralism into dependency theory, in which economic development of the periphery is seen as a nearly impossible task. While dependency theory was the polar opposite of Prebisch and the ECLAC's original purpose, he continued to criticize the neo-classical economic forces that he felt were victimizing the global poor.