Development and underdevelopment must be analyzed within a single world economic system

Evidence

One distinctive but seminal application of what is taken to be the Marxist paradigm is to be found in Gunder Frank. His work was itself counterposed to the dominant and formative school of “dependency” theorists, grouped around the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA ) which was established in 1948. This school adopted a more rigorously structural analysis to explain the “underdevelopment” of the underdeveloped countries of the region. As against earlier developmentalist models, the ECLA “school” insisted that development and underdevelopment had to be treated within the single framework of a world economic system. The “underdeveloped” countries were the dependent sectors of such a world economy: as Celso Furtado put it, “the theory of underdevelopment turns out to be essentially a theory of dependence” (Furtado 1971, cited in O’Brien 1975). — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 605

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the core tenet of the ECLA dependency school: underdevelopment is dependence, not a stage before development.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in Hall’s contribution to economic thought — dependency theory as a structural alternative to developmentalist economics. — connects to: More industrially developed countries display the future of less developed ones — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2248