The ECLA school explained underdevelopment as dependence within a single world economic system.

Evidence

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). This starting point within a global economic framework had much in common, in a “broadly” Marxist way, with those writers who had attempted to deal with modern aspects of capitalist development on a world scale in terms of a “theory of imperialism” (e.g., Lenin, Luxembourg, Hilferding, and Bukharin). — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 605

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ECLA/dependency-theory school and its core claim that underdevelopment is a theory of dependence.
• XREF: Connects directly to my reading goal on how these essays contribute to economic thought — this is the theoretical terrain of global dependency that later debates react against.