It was Raúl Prebisch, effectively the founder of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, who first spotted his talent. In 1949 Furtado was made part of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), one of the regional commissions of the UN, situated in Santiago, Chile. A year later, Prebisch, by then the head of ECLAC, appointed Furtado as the first director of the new economic development division.

Although Furtado worked for the commission only until 1957, these were crucial formative years for him. He became a leading contributor to the Latin American structuralist school of development which germinated there. Besides Prebisch and Furtado, it included such thinkers as Aníbal Pinto, Juan Noyola, Osvaldo Sunkel, Victor Urquidi and Jorge Ahumada.

The commission’s proposals had a profound influence on economic policy throughout Latin America. They advocated an import-substituting industrialisation policy, combined with economic integration. By exposing the various mechanisms of unequal exchange between the North and the South, they also argued for a fairer international economic order. In 1956, Furtado met Nicholas Kaldor, a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, who impressed him with his use of Keynesian categories for the analysis of problems in economic development. Like Prebisch, Furtado was much influenced by Keynes’s thought, particularly regarding the role of the State.

Kaldor invited Furtado to stay for a year at King’s, in 1957-58. There he met such leading economists such as Piero Sraffa, Joan Robinson, A. K. Sen, Piero Garegnani, Richard Kahn, Arthur Pigou and James Mead. While there, he also wrote The Economic Growth of Brazil: A Survey from Colonial to Modern Times (1959; in English 1963). It became a highly influential book.

A prolific writer, Furtado published more than 30 accessible and engaging books, which were translated into 15 languages and have sold more than two million copies all over the world. His Economic Development of Latin America: Historical Background and Contemporary Problems (1970) became the standard text for students following Latin American studies in the UK and elsewhere, especially during the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1958 Furtado was appointed director of the Brazilian Bank of Economic Development by the Government of Juscelino Kubitschek. There he conceived the project which in 1959 led to the creation of Sudene, a government agency for the promotion of development in the impoverished northeast of Brazil. He directed the agency until the military coup which overthrew the reformist Ggovernment of João Goulart in 1964.

During the Goulart Government he had also become Brazil’s first Minister of Planning (1962-63). With the coup, however, he was deprived of his political rights and emigrated. He took up appointments in various universities, including Yale (1964-65) and the Sorbonne (1965-85). He was the first foreign professor to be appointed by the Sorbonne; the decree was signed by President de Gaulle. In 1973-74 he held the Simón Bolívar Chair in Latin American Studies in Cambridge.

Although not a Marxist, Furtado was influenced by some Marxist ideas. He was one of the first social scientists to use the term “dependency” (in one of his first books, published in 1956), and he made a major contribution to dependency theory, which captured the imagination of students during the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America and elsewhere.

Like André Gunder Frank, but well before him, Furtado argued that development and underdevelopment are part of the same historical process, and are different sides of the same global system. As underdevelopment is a specific phenomenon it “calls for an effort at autonomous theorisation”, as he wrote in his book Development and Underdevelopment (1964).

From 1979 to 1982 he was a member of the UN committee for development planning in New York. With the return to democracy in Brazil he was first appointed Brazil’s Ambassador to the European Union in Brussels (1985-86) and then Minister of Culture (1986-88).

In 1987-91 he was a member of the South Commission (Geneva), which was headed by Julius Nyerere, the former President of Tanzania, and in which Manmohan Singh, now the Prime Minister of India, played a leading role. He served Unesco’s world commission on culture and development in 1993-95 and on its international bioethics committee in 1995-97. In 1997 he was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters and in 2003 to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

Furtado was a resolute supporter of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva during his campaign for the presidency, and celebrated his victory in 2002. Though he applauded President Lula’s fight against poverty he became concerned with his economic policy, which found increasing approval from the IMF and the World Bank in Washington. However, Furtado was pleased when, in July last year, Lula decided to recreate Sudene, the project he had founded.

Furtado’s last political act was to throw his weight behind Carlos Lessa, a progressive economist, in his efforts to remain as head of the National Bank for Economic and Social Development when the Brazilian Government wanted to replace him. But to no avail: just days before Furtado’s death, Lessa was persuaded to resign. Furtado’s standing was such, though, that President Lula felt the need to telephone him to defend his actions. After his death Lula proclaimed three days of national mourning.

In 1948 Furtado married Lucía Tosi. After their divorce he married Rosa Freire d’Aguiar, a Brazilian journalist, in 1979. She survives him, as do two sons from his first marriage.

Celso Furtado, economist, was born on July 26, 1920. He died on November 20, 2004, aged 84.