North-South terms-of-trade trends from 1960 to 2006

The composition of exports of developing countries is increasingly dominated by manufactured goods. This has not changed the fact that their major trading partners continue to be the developed countries. In order to properly assess the distribution of gains from trade, there is a pressing need to analyze the movements in the terms of trade of developing countries with respect to the developed ones. A statistical analysis of the North-South terms of trade reveals that the terms of trade have turned against the South since the 1960s. However, the terms-of-trade deterioration is neither continuous nor evenly distributed over different country groupings. The existence of a structural break in the mid-to-late 1970s together with the greatest adverse terms-of-trade movements against the highly indebted and least developed countries attest the discontinuity and unevenness of this process.