From Unlearning Economics Live: Dr Ingrid Kvangraven, a senior lecturer in International Development at King’s College London. Ingrid specializing in dependency theory, a branch of scholarship that emphases that poorer countries are kept dependent on richer countries, shares her views on its ongoing relevance and crucially how it can help us to understand modern narratives about global development.
Dependency can happen through a variety of means: trade relations, finance, military. Dependency theory fell out of fashion in mainstream academia but is experiencing something of a renaissance.
Here in this vidieo, Dr. Ingrid shares her views on dependency economy:
Note from the Ideas Letter: Dependency theory argues that poorer countries are trapped in their condition by their richer counterparts. Dependence can happen through a variety of means, such as trade relations, finance, and defense. Crucially for countries seeking to emulate their richer counterparts, this means that simple market capitalism won’t develop underdeveloped nations. Historical processes, such as colonialism and the exploitative development of capitalism, have entrenched structural disparities between the global North and South. Kvangraven highlights that only a few countries have managed to transition to industrialized economies, leaving a majority still categorized as part of the “global South.”
Dependency theorists “take a very historical approach to understanding capitalist development so this is like a part of the development of underdevelopment that I mentioned earlier um where they see how capitalism evolved in this uneven way and they could they try to understand capitalism in the periphery which is what they call Global South, in connection with how it evolved in the global North and they’re seeing this as part of the same system. They focus on the specific constraints that this leads to for the periphery like the kind of balance payments constraint that I mentioned earlier how they’re impacted by having to borrow in the in the US dollar and technological dependence and things like that there’s a range of constraints that come from being in the periphery that they try to identify. They see capitalism as inherently polarizing or uneven like generating this unevenness which is in stark contrast to more mainstream understanding of seeing it as one country developed and then others just catch up …”
