Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven has a new paper Beyond The Stereotype: Restating The Relevance Of The Dependency Research Programme in the journal Development And Change in which argues for the high importance of “dependency theory” which she wants to call a research programme.

There’s a good Twitter thread by her summarising the paper.

The central idea of the theoretical framework is that:

core countries benefit from the global system at the expense of periphery countries, which face structural barriers that make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to develop in the same way that the core countries did.

And from the summary at the end:

… defining dependency theory as a research programme provides an alternative way of categorizing dependency scholarship that captures the breadth of the scholarship as well as its strengths. This research programme — characterized by 1) theorization on the persistence of uneven development; with a focus on 2) the specific constraints peripheral countries face; and 3) structures of production; with 4) a global historical approach to these issues — provides a foundation from which to fruitfully explore important questions related to development and global inequality.

Although, the paper doesn’t mention the name of Nicholas Kaldor, I look at such issues using his work, and agree quite a bit with the dependency research programme.