DEPENDENT DEVELOPMENT

Dependent development is a central concept of dependency theory.

Rather than seeing the world's nations dividing economic labor and interacting as equal partners, dependent development suggests that some nations are able to impose unequal exchanges on others and thus retard the economic development of these nations or make their development dependent on stronger or more economically advanced nations.

Dependent development has typically involved the exporting of primary resources.

At the beginning of the seventies, Brazil was the archetype of "dependent development," a country whose rapid industrialization was propelled by a combination of investment by transnational corporations and the demand for consumer durables that depended on rising inequality. - Peter B. Evans

Transnational Economic Linkages, the State, and Dependent Development in South Korea, 1966-1988: A Time-Series Analysis - York W. Bradshaw, Young-Jeong Kim, Bruce London, Social Forces, Vol. 72, No. 2 (Dec., 1993), pp. 315-345
Abstract: This article uses time-series analysis to examine development patterns in South Korea, a country that has realized dramatic economic growth over the last several decades. We show that

(1) arguments associated with classical dependency and dependent development theory must be modified substantially when applied to Korea;

(2) the Korean state has been an important actor in the country's economic success, closely regulating direct foreign investment but strongly encouraging foreign trade; and

(3) foreign trade and foreign loans have facilitated economic growth throughout the Korean economy, whereas the capital outflow associated with direct foreign investment continues to impede expansion. Overall, we conclude that Korea has experienced a form of "dependent development" that relies heavily on international trade (especially exports), a strong national state, and local business. This pattern is in contrast to Latin American dependent development, which places a heavy emphasis on direct foreign investment. - jstor.org

Dependent Development in the Third World in the Decade of Oil - Barry Almark, S. S. Alvarado, Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 15, No. 3, 97-114 (1983) DOI: 10.1177/048661348301500309 © 1983 Union for Radical Political Economics
Barry Almark and S. S. Alvarado argue that after a decade of Third World control over oil resources, the economic dependence of most Third World countries has, if anything, increased. Their discussion focuses on the difficulties that confronted the developing countries which import oil while also describing the mixed blessings that high oil prices turned out to be for the oil exporters. The end of the narrative, 1983, finds a developing world with stagnant economic growth where independent Third World policy actions are virtually ruled out by their foreign creditors, both private banks and the governments of the major capitalist countries, the United States above all. 
Almark and Alvarado thus shift our focus in this collection from problems of the energy sector per se to the impact of energy developments on the economy at large. The focus also shifts from individual case studies to developments affecting whole groups of countries. Indeed, they have sought to discern the common thread in the experience of many countries. As such they have concentrated on telling a story, not in explaining what forces made it happen. However, the underlying determinant of much that they describe seems to be a stagnating world economy, one in which increasingly severe recessions are followed by weaker and briefer recovery periods. A theory about why that is happening and how the situation might further evolve is the subject of the article which follows A lmark and A Ivarado. - rrp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/15/3/97

Structural Consolidation: The Colorado Delta Region, 1900-10 - Miguel De Oliver
The isolation and severe environment of Baja California Norte and its most notable feature, the Colorado Delta region, impeded its incorporation into the global economy. In the period of vast sys-temic consolidation and expansion of the capitalist world-system in the late 19th and early 20th century via transnational corporations, a large quantity of investment capital primarily in the form of one transnational, linked the Colorado Delta region to the global economy. The result was capital-intensive dependent development and the region's conversion to the role of peripheral producer in the world-economy. It was in this region that the foreign-controlled transnational agribusiness that proliferates in modern Northern Mexico was first introduced. - binghamton.edu/fbc/abstract.htm

Evans & Gereffi conclude that there is no evidence that endogenous political forces are as important in the process of dependent development as external ones (1984: 118).

The Historical and Global Nature of Dependent Development - Kathleen C. Schwartzman
A Time-Series Analysis of Brazil and Mexico, 1901-80
Despite its historical pedigree, "history" rarely appears as a variable in dependency studies. We do not know from the empirical scholarship, for example, if dependency processes observed in the period prior to the Second World War foretell those of the postwar period; if observations about dependency relations found in the upswing hold for periods of downswing; or if dependency relationships are affected by world-system factors such as the global growth.
Ironically, the empirical scholarship in dependency research appears guilty of the charge leveled against neoclassical economists: it presents what it observes as laws that seem to be eternal and is unable to integrate history into the analysis (Fontvieille, 1991: 234).
This is surely a preposterous charge to level against the dependency research agenda which was born of the recognition that 1) the history of developed countries did not reveal the path of underdeveloped ones; and 2) that one could not comprehend the current state of underdevelopment without the recognition of the historical processes which integrated peripheral countries into the global economy.
Dependency theorists assert that postcolonial market mechanisms-mediated principally through prices-produce economic outcomes similar to those produced by the political apparatus of the colonial state. While the scholarship has moved away from the more orthodox "underdevelopment" position, it affirms, in many cases, a "dependent development" position, namely, that countries which are more "dependent" on industrialized nations for the direction and velocity of their growth suffer dampened or distorted economic development.

Dependent Development and Regional Integration: A Critical Examination of the Southern... Richards Latin American Perspectives.1997; 24: 133-155 - lap.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/24/6/133.pdf

Cardoso's Theory of Dependent Development and the Socio-political Limits of Foreign Corporate Ownership in Brazil - Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Hilton Hawaiian Village, Honolulu, Hawaii, Abells, Susan
Abstract: When Fernando Henrique Cardoso became President of Brazil in 1995, he implemented a model of development under the Washington Consensus that reproduced and accelerated Brazil’s situation of dependency, shifting control of the most dynamic sectors of Brazil’s industrial structure to transnational corporations. In this paper, I examine the contradictions between Cardoso’s theories as an academic and his actions as a politician. Adopting Cardoso’s own historical materialist framework, which recognizes the imperatives of the world market and the socio-political limits imposed on capitalist expansion by class struggle, I analyse the political economy of Brazil from its transition to democracy in 1985 to the end of Cardoso’s presidency in 2002. I argue that with their power to influence the industrial strategy of Brazil badly eroded, those domestic capitalists disenfranchised by Cardoso’s development model abandoned it in the presidential election of 2002 to ally themselves with Lula and Brazil’s subaltern classes, fracturing the unity of the capitalist classes, creating a crisis of hegemony.

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