Dependency Analysis

Dependency analysis is a historical-structural framework for explaining the persistent underdevelopment of poorer countries, developed by Latin American and dependency scholars in the 1960s and 1970s. Its founding claim, sharpened by Andre Gunder Frank in 'The Development of Underdevelopment' (1966), is that the poverty of the periphery is not a backward original condition awaiting modernization but is actively produced by the region's subordinate relation to the wealthy center: through colonial and post-colonial trade, the periphery's surplus is siphoned to the metropole via unequal exchange. Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, in Dependency and Development in Latin America (1979), gave the tradition its most influential statement by insisting that dependency operates through the internal class structures and political alliances of peripheral societies, producing not stagnation alone but particular, distorted forms of 'associated-dependent' development.