Neoclassical Logic

[Forstater, Mathew]

but the statistical debate on the net barter terms of trade shows
Prebisch-Singer to be valid (see David Sapsford's work, in particular). while
initially couched in terms of types of products, primary vs. manufactures, P-S
was later reformulated in terms of differing structural characteristics of
'first' and 'third' world economies, including structural features close to
those emphasized by Lewis. So I think one can still argue that technical
progress in the periphery tends to translate into lower relative prices for core
imports and technical progress in the core tends to result in higher profits
(and sometimes higher relative wages) in the core. comments?

From: Brad DeLong [mailto:delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU]

Lewis's model was built with the late nineteenth century in mind. 
Lewis was trying to figure out why a lot of technology transfer to 
the periphery hadn't raised real wages in places like Nigeria and 
Brazil. His conclusion was that outmigration from China and India had 
pushed wages down in Asian migrant-recipient regions--and the fact 
that Asian migrant-recipient regions were producing the same tropical 
primary products as the rest of the tropical periphery kept living 
standards very low everywhere in the tropical periphery, so that all 
productivity gains were captured by first-world consumers.

The model looks very promising for explaining what was going on up 
until 1914 or so. But the big migration flows are then choked off...