 A lot of mainstream and even some heterodox scholarship on development is reduced to a kind of technical problem that we need to fix, whereas dependency theorists always saw that there was a problem of power inequality, that you needed to understand power dynamics in order to understand both inequalities within the periphery, but also of course power inequalities within the global economy. My name is Ingrid Harveld-Quangraven and I'm a lecturer at King's College London. So in our new book, Decolonizing Economics and Introduction, Karolina Alves, David Cadet and Serbik Khazar and I are analyzing how the economics field became Eurocentric and remains Eurocentric and we identify how to challenge this and how you can have a south-centered theory. And dependency theory is one way of doing this or one tradition that does take the south as a starting point for theorization. So this could be one avenue to challenge your centrism in the field. So what is dependency theory is actually quite a complicated question. Dependency is a situation where an economy is conditioned by the expansion or development of another economy. This opens up for a range of different kinds of theorizations and approaches to dependency. Like what does it mean to be conditioned? How did the conditioning happen historically? And what are the implications of this conditioning? How do you get out of it? That's the kind of starting point of dependency, that there are these economies in the periphery, as the dependency theorists called it, that are conditioned by being a part of the global economy with center countries as well. So within this, Teotonia de Santa, this was a Marxist, there were a lot of Marxists writing about this in the 70s. There were also structuralists as well and institutionalists, so there were actually really big debates and disagreements about what dependency theory is or was. The dependency theory in many ways was a reaction to theories that were put forward in the global north, modernization theory, developmentalist theory. Also some varieties of Marxist theory, Eurocentric Marxist theory. So what the dependency theorists, how they were theorizing was building on this but rejecting kind of Eurocentrism. So you had anti-colonial, anti-imperialist Marxism. You had structuralists that took dependency into account. You had institutionalists as well. So those are the main theoretical strands within the tradition. So I think dependency theory has a bit of a reputational problem, because of the name of the tradition, dependency theory, and that's what led me to try to identify what is the core of the tradition, what are the strengths of the tradition. So what I then identify as the strengths of all of these different theoretical traditions that see dependency in different ways is, first of all, that they all take a global historical approach and look at the development of capitalism, how it interacts with colonialism and how this leads to very different differently structured economies in the periphery compared to the center countries. And then the second one is that they theorize about how capitalism tends to be polarizing or the unevenness of capitalist development. So that's also important because it moves away from just describing what's going on in the periphery to actually theorizing so that we can explain and understand. The third is that they focus on structures of production, so it moves away from a lot of the development literature that looks at just culture or education or institutions to really look at how is production organized, what are the social relations and how is this a part of the global economy. Finally, there is the focus on the particularities of the countries in the periphery and the particular constraints that they face. So this is about theorizing from the vantage point of the periphery or the global south, which was very, very important in the 70s. As I said, the dependency theory is kind of a reaction to what they saw as Eurocentric theorizing in the north. A lot of mainstream social theory tended to see the development of capitalism as something that was peaceful, that was endogenous to Europe, that happened because of scientific advancements, the enlightenment, hard work, and then swept away everything that had to do with colonialism or the slave trade, which led to a very distorted view of how capitalism operates. But the problem, of course, for the dependency theorist was not just that this sort of theory existed in terms of trying to understand Europe. A lot of these social theorists universalized these ideas to expect universal laws to apply to countries across the world. So in that sense, it's a really important aspect of dependency theory that most of them were based in the global south and they saw things from the perspective of the global south. So this is also a tradition that can help us to try to challenge Eurocentrism in economic theory today. Those four features distinguish dependency theory and define dependency theory, but probably within each of the four, you see a stark difference with the mainstream. So the historical approach is very different from an equilibrium approach, for example, what's often common in development economics is to try to identify relationships based on cross-country regressions, so therefore removing the historical specificities. The gold standard in development economics now is to just do experiments, to try to see how behavior affects different developmental outcomes, and that also is starkly different from a global historical approach that tries to understand how development problems are historically specific to the periphery or different countries in the periphery. And then the structures of production also is very different from some parts of the mainstream at least that tend to focus more on culture education institutions. So it leads to very different kinds of questions and a different focus. And then the polarizing tendencies of capitalism is, of course, very different from this view that there would be convergence, which is still dominant in a lot of theorizing today that assumes that eventually countries will and can catch up. But you can see that there are some clubs of countries that have been able to catch up to a certain extent. And there are some countries that have been able to move from the periphery to the center, but very, very few. There's like South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore that have made this leap. So generally we see that there's still very large unevenness, that the world is still more or less divided into center and periphery. And then finally, of course, the constraints to development that are particular to the periphery are incredibly important in terms of rejecting this idea that developing countries are just late-comers, that they're like a pre-image of what the advanced countries are today, that they can just use the same policies, that they're like smaller versions of an industrialized country. So that's also a big difference from mainstream theory. A lot of mainstream and even some heterodox scholarship on development, development is reduced to a kind of technical problem that we need to fix. Whereas dependency theorists always saw that there was a problem of power inequality, that you needed to understand power dynamics in order to understand both inequalities within the periphery, but also, of course, power inequalities within the global economy. It's quite common in a lot of development literature and in history of thought to argue that things have changed so drastically since the 70s that dependency theory is no longer relevant. So you have the fragmentation of global value chains, which has led to manufacturing spreading to the periphery. You have financialization, you have the rise of China, you have the East Asian Tigers that managed to develop within capitalism. If you think of dependency theory as a research program, it is highly relevant. Actually, I argue that actually dependency theory as a research program can explain exactly these changes in a very fruitful way and draw attention to certain aspects that you might not see if you don't take a dependency approach. So for example, we could start with a global value chains. And it's a common misconception that dependency theorists argued that the periphery was poor because they were exporting raw materials and the center was rich because they were exporting manufactured goods. Actually, the dependency theorists were looking at what kind of production is going on, what are the potential for spillover effects, what are the potential for technological development, how is this integrated into the wider labor markets and the wider economy and of course also the global economy. So they were concerned not simply with what is the export, but what the characteristics are more broadly. So therefore when you see a lot of countries in the periphery moving into global value chains, this approach to thinking about the characteristics of production or the structures of production can draw our attention to the fact that the parts of the global value chain that move to the global south tend to be low value added, very little opportunity for technological upgrading. From a dependency perspective, you can kind of understand that while you might think that spread of manufacturing to the whole world would lead to some kind of rebalancing of the economies, actually what we see is continued polarization. Innovation and technological development remains highly concentrated in the center countries and it seems more and more difficult for countries to upgrade. Paying attention to power and the constraints peripheral countries face can help us understand why global value chains are not this amazing road to development and it is also quite different to the traditional approach to global value chains or the mainstream approach to global value chains, which tends to focus on the firm. Like what can the firm do in order to upgrade or what kind of industrial policy would be good for a firm to be able to upgrade, which again reduces development to this technical aspect and brushes away all the power dynamics and problems that have to do with the other unevenness of capitalism and the high concentration of innovation. So the other thing, of course, that has led people to say that dependency theory is irrelevant is the transition of some countries to center status, global north status, developed status. But if you think of dependency theory as a research program, I argue that actually you can even understand the development of a country like South Korea better, even though that is something that is a transition from periphery to the center. Dependency theories did not say that it's impossible to make that transition, that it's impossible to develop within capitalism. What they drew attention to was how extremely difficult it is because of the way their economies had historically developed and particular constraints. So if you look at South Korea in contrast to the mainstream, the miracle is often explained by looking at domestic policies or market-based policies. And in the heterodoxy, it's often explained by the developmental state. But a dependency theory approach would actually look at, okay, how did capitalism develop in South Korea and what was the role of colonialism? South Korea was colonized by Japan, which was colonizing Korea on the way to try to conquer China. And actually Japan integrated the South Korean economy with its own, which led to industrialization actually in South Korea. Korean businessmen were incorporated into the structures of industry at the time during colonialism rather than subordinated, which is extremely different from how colonialism operated in African countries, other Asian countries, and in Latin America. There was a lot more sort of establishment of just extractivism. So this industrial development laid the foundations for what was later than to become the developmental states where South Korea was allowed to implement a lot of trade policies, industrial policies, that were not encouraged by other countries in the periphery at the time. And South Korea, of course, this is one of the problems that dependency theorists pointed to, is that if you want to industrialize as a peripheral economy, you are basically more or less doomed to run trade deficits, which is a really difficult to finance for a country in the periphery. But South Korea got lots of external financing from the US and Japan. And this had to do with its geopolitical location, strategic geopolitical location next to the threat, the communist threat of North Korea. So again, we're back to kind of power dynamics and the particular historical and political situation of South Korea led some of these constraints that were there for most peripheral countries. Taking this kind of dependency approach to understanding South Korea could actually help us kind of give a richer picture of how it managed to develop and also why it's so incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to replicate that exact model. I think in a world today where we see incredible inequalities in terms of average incomes, in terms of ability to finance development, in terms of differences in monetary autonomy, a dependency theory research program can really help to understand and challenge these inequalities and try to think of ways to overcome these inequalities. And I think that it's very fruitful. And actually, dependency theory is getting a lot more traction recently. There's been a lot more publications within a dependency theory tradition, I think because a lot of scholars and students are seeing that these inequalities are so durable and persistent. So in a sense, I think that dependency theory has a positive future that it can help us explain things and also there's more room now in maybe not in economics, but in other social sciences to use dependency theory, which for political reasons was for a long time undermined, marginalised. There is a problem of Eurocentrism in economic theory, especially after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. The economics field has also going through this reckoning that field can't grapple with racial inequalities, the field can't grapple with imperialism, which is a reckoning that a lot of other social science fields had in the 70s and 80s. Now, economics is a latecomer, but that's a good thing. That's an opening and dependency theory is a tradition that can help to open up avenues for understanding inequalities that have to do with colonialism and racial inequalities. So that's also another reason why dependency theory might gain some more traction in the future.