Parallel Lives: Dependency and Backwardness

2026-07-22

This project will investigate the relationship between economic development and global trade in the twentieth century. It will explore the connection between two alternatives to neoliberalism posed in the second half of the twentieth century: Soviet economic thinking and “dependency theory”, the predominantly Latin American approach that stressed the structural inequality between a rich “core” and a poor “periphery” of countries. The project will interrogate the intellectual and practical connections between the two, exploring the influence of Soviet economic thinking on some of the most influential thinkers on dependency and development. In particular, this proposed project will look at the debate in the USSR on the idea of “backwardness”, which socialism was supposed to overcome, and its impact on two of the founding fathers of dependency theory, the Argentinian Raúl Prebisch and the Brazilian Celso Furtado. Moreover, the project will investigate the significance of this transnational exchange of ideas for the development of global trade policy through two organizations that pushed for trade reform: the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The overarching argument is that dependency theory, both as an abstract concept and as a policy embodied by ECLA and UNCTAD, borrowed and re-elaborated many key ideas from the socialist tradition, through the mediation of Soviet texts and Soviet participation in international debates. The project will add a new crucial dimension to European research on the international circulation of economic ideas, which currently still lags behind the US in this field. Moreover, the proposed research will offer precious insights on the management of global and regional trade, an area especially relevant to European policy in the age of Brexit and the Trump presidency.

Italy

2026-02-15