Compare methods

	World-Systems Analysis	Dependency Analysis
Field	Political Economy	Political Economy
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1974	1966
Originator	Immanuel Wallerstein	Andre Gunder Frank; Fernando Henrique Cardoso & Enzo Faletto
Type	Historical-structural macrosociological framework	Historical-structural development framework
Seminal source	Wallerstein, I. (1974). The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Academic Press. ISBN: 9780127859200	Cardoso, F. H., & Faletto, E. (1979). Dependency and Development in Latin America. University of California Press. ISBN: 9780520031937
Aliases	World-System Theory, World-Systems Theory, Wallersteinian Analysis, Capitalist World-Economy Analysis	Dependency Theory, Dependencia Analysis, Center-Periphery Analysis, Underdevelopment Theory
Related	4	4
Summary	World-systems analysis is a historical-structural framework, founded by Immanuel Wallerstein in The Modern World-System (1974) and codified in his 2004 introduction, that takes as its unit of analysis not the nation-state but a single, integrated capitalist world-economy that has expanded since the long sixteenth century to encompass the globe. Within this world-economy a single axial division of labor binds together a hierarchy of zones — core, semiperiphery, and periphery — through which surplus flows unequally from peripheral to core regions. States, classes, and firms are understood by their position in this structure rather than as self-contained societies, and the system is read over the longue duree, attentive to long cycles of accumulation and to the rise and decline of successive hegemonic powers.	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.