Dependency Theory

Georg Sørensen

According to dependency theory, Third World countries in the periphery of the global capitalist system are poor and underdeveloped because they are exploited by the advanced capitalist countries in the core. Their major problem is dependency on the core countries. That is the central claim made by dependency theory, a mode of analysis developed primarily by Latin American scholars in the 1960s and 1970s. Dependency theory emerged as a reaction against the modernization paradigm, which dominated Western liberal approaches to development during the decades after World War II. Modernization theory argued that Third World countries should be expected to follow the same developmental path as taken earlier by developed countries in the West: a progressive journey from a traditional, preindustrial, agrarian society, toward a modern, industrial, mass-consumption society. Development meant overcoming barriers of preindustrial production, backward institutions, and parochial value systems that impeded the process of growth and modernization. The ...

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