dependency theory

[Michael McIntyre]

Well, I suppose if you want to reduce it all to the Singer-Prebisch approach, Brad has a point.  There is, of course, the whole business of "associated-dependent development" which locates the problem with dependence not in rates of growth per se but in the inability to develop an autonomous capital goods sector . . . but even that school didn't anticipate Asian developments.  And then there's Peter Evans's post-dependentista attempt to make state-society relations, not openness to trade per se, a key independent variable (verdict - you need a state that is both autonomous and embedded in society, as odd as that sounds).  But if economic development (i.e., rate of growth of GDP) is the dependent variable, then I think it's fair to say that dependencia is a degenerate research program.

Something a bit odd happened along the way, though.  When I learned my dependencia back in grad school, David Collier swore that there was no way anyone could find a consistent independent variable in Cardoso and Faletto.  Then I got out of grad school and had to teach the book.  Guess what: there are consistent independent variables, to with a) enclave economies, b) economies in control of a local bourgeoisie with servile labor, and c) economies in control of a local bourgeoisie with wage labor.

The next term, for another class, I was teaching the (then new) book by Dietrich Rueschemeyer, John Stephens, and Evelyn Hueber Stephens, _Capitalist Development and Democracy_.  Guess what?  Turn to their Latin America section and you'll find the same independent variables as in Cardoso and Faletto, but with the ("bourgeois") democracy as the dependent variable.

Interesting theories never go away . . . they just turn out to be not what their inventors meant . . . and others fight for them under other names.

Michael McIntyre


>>> dhenwood at panix.com 08/10/01 11:00AM >>>
[bounced bec of an address kink]

Well, in the post-WWII era those countries that developed the fastest
were those that integrated into the world economy as fast and as
fully as possible, while still maintaining tariffs that put downward
pressure on luxury imports, and perhaps tariffs that maintained space
for developing industries in areas of emerging comparative advantage
(textiles, assembly, basic metals, consumer electronics, et cetera).
Those countries that did the worst were those that tried to reduce
the share of trade in GDP and build up a mirror image of a
first-world industrial base from scratch. (All this, however, leaves
to one side the governance and corruption issues that are perhaps the
most crucial.)

So I think the judgement has to be that dependency theory was
hopelessly naive, and that the "development of underdevelopment" is a
much more complicated phenomenon than the dependentistas realized...

Brad DeLong