ABSTRACT
Andre Gunder Frank, perhaps the most prolific and controversial Development Economist and Sociologist of the post-war era, best known as the author of “Dependency” theory, died on Saturday in Luxembourg, age 76, after a long battle against cancer. The decisive turning point in his career came when he visited Cuba in 1960 and Ghana and Guinea in Africa. He spent the rest of the 1960s living and working in Latin America, mainly in Brazil, Mexico, and Chile and analyzing their underdevelopment. Frank’s copious work on “the crisis” chronicled the disastrous onset of “market ideology” and the return of efficiency before equity in theory and policy. As a person, Gunder Frank was principled and uncompromising, yet always willing to listen to the evidence and an opposing argument, and even to accept that he was wrong and to change his views.
