Structural Changes in the World Economy: Conclusions and Prospects

Abstract

The historical evolution of North-South relations is the history of unequal partners. Economic development in the periphery has always been a reflexion of the needs of the centre. Yet these reflexions have been different. Independently of whether one shares Keynes’s opinion that when re-writing economic history it should be asked whether ‘the long stagnation of the Middle Ages may not have been more surely and inevitably caused by Europe’s meagre supply of the monetary metals than by monasticism or Gothic frenzy’ (Keynes, 1965, p. 151), the tremendous impact of the gold that was robbed in Latin America on Europe cannot be denied.