MORE than fifty years since its foundation, the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) continues to be a source of influence and an important research topic on the Brazilian and Latin-American economic history. Despite the enduring appeal of the cepalina theory, the scholarly studies on ECLA have done little to examine the reasons why the ECLA's underdevelopment theory was so prominent among policy makers, entrepreneurs and scholars, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s. Likewise, the historiography has rarely attempted to assess ECLA's impact over other economic approaches in Latin America and Brazil in particular. This article aims to advance hypotheses about both issues, that is, the determinants of the cepalina influence during the 1950s and 1960s, and its impact on later economic approaches. The view presented in the article is that the influence exerted by ECLA is a great deal explained by the features of its theoretical and conceptual framework - it was consistent and relevant, on the one hand, and ambiguous and vague, on the other. The article also argues that the cepalina theory was and continues to be influential among economic approaches in Brazil. The article addresses two approaches, the dependency theory and the late capitalism theory, and maintains that both took over some central features which marked the ECLA theory - the emphasis on structures, the minor role of social actors, the stress on a macro perspective and the development of a formal view of history.
