Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2009
Contemporary ‘dependency’ writers have attributed the origins of most of Latin America's past and present economic problems to the expansion of European capitalism in the nineteenth century. It led to the formation of alliances between local elites and powerful foreign interests, giving the latter participation in policy making. The main tenet of the ‘dependency school’ is that the economic policies derived from this alliance, and the alliance itself, were detrimental to ‘national’ development, since they inhibited the growth of the non-export oriented activities of the economy.
1 The literature is enormous and cannot be discussed in detail here. For a summary, see Bath, C. Richard and Dilmus, D. James, ‘Dependency Analysis of Latin America’, in Latin American Research Rerview, Vol. 11, No. 3 (1976), pp. 3–54.Google Scholar
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