The concept of “development” was originally thought in strict economic sense –as rising per capita income. Under the United Nations leadership, it came to encompass its social and environmental dimensions: the International Labor Organization developed the concept of “basic needs” in the 1970s, and the United Nations Development Program that of “human development”. The environmental dimensions of development were also gradually incorporated and led to a broad concept of “sustainable development” that in the United Nations terminology includes the economic, social and environmental dimensions, as incorporated in particular in the “sustainable development goals” approved in 2015.

Development economics was born in the 1940s and 1950s in Eastern Europe and Latin America, the two regions of the developing world that had achieved an intermediate level of development. Paul Rosenstein-Rodan and Raul Prebisch are clear examples. From the start, it was associated with broader intellectual economic debates, particularly on the role of the state in economic policy, which had made a push forward in the 1930s with the Keynesian revolution.

The United Nations played an important role in development thinking and in advising developing countries at the time. ECLAC was an early leader in this regard, with Prebisch as the intellectual leader. The UN also became the center of the debates on the need to reform the world economic system. Since its creation, UNCTAD played a crucial role in this regard.

The ideas put forward by the new field of economics took place in a world economy that was already highly unequal in terms of levels of development, and characterized by a division of labor in which developed countries were exporters of manufactures and developing countries of primary goods. This was behind Prebisch’s view of the world system as a “center-periphery”. In his view and that of Hans Singer, one feature of that system was the tendency for the terms of trade to move against primary goods and, thus, of developing countries.