Frank, Andre Gunder

Andre Gunder Frank was an influential and controversial academic for five decades (from the late 1950s until his death in 2005). His most significant contributions on the subject of poverty date from the 1960s to the early 1970s, when he was prominent within the Latin American Dependency School, which argued that underdevelopment stemmed from external dependence rather than internal factors. Frank was the most influential member of the school’s radical wing. The revolutionary era in which he wrote in and the polemical style of his publications partly explains his wide appeal.

First developed in relation to Latin America, Frank later applied his dependency analysis to the underdeveloped Third World more broadly. While he sometimes used the word underdevelopment as a synonym for poverty, he mostly employed ...