With political independence, the Less Developed Countries inherited a structure of production and international trade that had largely been designed to serve the interests of metropolotian powers, rather than those of the LDCs themselves.They were heavily dependent on the production and export of a limited range of primary commodities (foodstuffs, fuels and industrial raw materials) going mainly to the developed capitalist economy. In many cases, that dependence has not yet been broken.At the present time, for example, coffee still represents approximately 90 per cent of Burundi's recorded export and 50 per cent of Columbia's; copper accounts for more than 70 per cent of Zambia's export; cocoa represents more than 70 percent of Ghana's exports. Many other examples could be given.The import structures of the LDC were dominated by the importation of manufactured goods and intermediate inputs - durable consumer goods, machinery, and transport equipment, chemicals, pereoleum and so on. At independence most trade was with the colonial "mother country".Orthodox economists tended to argue that this strcture of production and trade was consistent with the :DC comparative advantage and that they enjoy significant gans from trade. The critics of this view, however, maintain that the gain from trade were more likely, for variety of reasons, to be appropriated by the developed capitalist economies. The unequal exchange thesis espoused by some neo-Marxrists, went further and suggested that trade was actually carried out at the expense of the LDC, producing the condition of under development and poverty.At the center of the relationship between trade and development remains the controversy concerning the long term behavior of the terms of trade of the LDC. The commodity, or net barter, terms of trade are the ratio of the unit price of export to the unit price of import and the deterioration in the index implies that a given volume of exports is exchanged for a smaller volume of imports.The secular deterioration hypothesis is associated with the work of Hans Singer and Raul Prebisch. In its original form, it was based on the argument that in the developed countries strong trade unions could ensure that workers, rather than consumers, benefited from productive gains, whereas in the LDC, higher productivity led to lower prices, thus benefiting consumers in the developed economies. Associated with, although formally separated from, such argument was the view that primary commodity export prices were highly unstabe and prone violent fluctuations, thus damaging the development of the LDC.
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