On this day in 2005 Andre Gunder Frank died.

He was one of the most prolific and controversial development economists and sociologists of the later half of the 20th century, and? is best remembered as an early exponent of dependency theory, which is the idea that resources flow from a "periphery" of poor and exploited states to a "core" of wealthy states, enriching the latter at the expense of the former.

Frank argued that historically, ‘core’ nations such as the USA and UK, who made up the elite ‘metropolis’, exploited ‘peripheral’ nations by keeping them as satellites in a state of dependency and under-development. Developed nations become wealthy by exploiting the poorest nations and using them as a source of cheap raw materials and labour. He suggested that this exploitative relationship was evident throughout the course of history (e.g. in the practice of slavery and in Western colonisation of other parts of the world) and was maintained into the twentieth century through Western countries’ domination of international trade, the emergence of large multinational companies and the reliance of less-developed countries on Western aid.

In the about 40 books and nearly a thousand articles and other pieces that he produced, Frank turned traditional and conventional theories on their heads over a wide range of issues. Many of his analyses and predictions concerning the developing world have proved accurate: the persistence of poverty despite foreign investment and because of unmanageable debt servicing; the failures of national capitalism in developing countries and of Soviet-bloc and Chinese communism; and the negative effects of global capitalism.

Frank rejected Eurocentrism in favour of a humanistic, world-historical perspective that views the West's global dominance as already in decline. In his more recent work he focused his attention on the analysis of the crisis in the world economy and then also on global world history.???

Perhaps his most notable work is Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. Published in 1967, it was one of the formative texts in dependency theory. In his later career he produced works such as ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age and, with Barry Gills, The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand.

He is also well known for suggesting that purely export- oriented solutions to development create imbalances detrimental to poor countries. He argued instead for the exact opposite approach: that the only way for such underdeveloped countries to experience economic development was to become independent of what he called ‘the politics of diffusion’ and to challenge the idea that the developed centres of capitalism would somehow come to the rescue by ‘diffusing’ their capitalist features to the underdeveloped world.

Frank died in 2005 of complications related to cancer.? He was one of TNI’s earliest fellows and? participated in TNI’ 1974? Chile Conference "The Lessons from Chile".? His ideas directly and indirectly inspired a lot of subsequent work at TNI, and his bold theories and unwavering sense of justice continue to inspire other thinkers at TNI.?