This article discusses the broad topic of the international diffusion of economic ideas and theories, by stressing its relevance for a better understanding of the process of formation of economic thought on a national scale. The article explores several meaningful examples of the international flow of economics and presents a brief survey of the main historiographical approaches available. It gives special emphasis to the influence of CEPAL (ECLA, United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America) - namely through the writings of Raul Prebisch and Celso Furtado - in Portugal and Spain in the 1950s, which features an atypical case of a peripheral influence on semi-peripheral countries. The articles main claim is that the study of international diffusion of economic thought sheds new light onto both the very understanding of the building of economics as a science and the awareness of its implications on the functioning and change of economic reality within a given national context.
economic thought; national history; international diffusion; CEPAL